My Creative Story: Part 7 The Get Messy Roots

Read Why I Am Telling My Creative Story and see each part of the story here. In the last installment of this story I shared with you how Caylee and I dreamed up Get Messy and posted our first post all within a week. We post our art journal pages and then an email comes in: Sabine wants to join us. Then another, then another. After about 3 weeks of us posting and adding new people in there are 7 people posting an art journal page every Thursday and creating a little linking group. People see the value in creating consistently and having that accountability. To accommodate our new friends we change our name to “Get Messy: An Art Journal Challenge”. But it doesn’t stop at 7...So many people want to join! We have no idea what to do because links are getting out of control. I have the idea to create a blurb for people to use along with the promo picture to show that they are in our group. Caylee has the great idea to create a landing page and put everyone’s links up so participants just need one link and can then get to everyone’s pages. But! Not just anyone can join, well anyone can join but not stay forever. Caylee and I were VERY adamant that this challenge was to create consistency in our creative lives and that people had to be staying true to this to stay on our link list. And people were. The list was growing and growing. Then we wanted to find a way to add in more community for our members so we started a facebook group for our participants to chat in about art journal and creating.Soon the admin has become overwhelming. We are constantly checking everyone’s links and feel that we are ‘policing’ the group. But the group is amazing. People are SO NICE and SO GENEROUS in this group. They are sharing all their art journal secrets and becoming real friends. It is officially something well beyond our reach as there are over a hundred people participating and it’s growing everyday. We decide we need a leadership team and we name the first 7 who join as our creative team of sorts. These are all creative ladies who we have come to know really well and love. My blog is growing like crazy now. I am posting consistently, giving people a way to participate and I am participating in groups now. This is a win-win-win for everything I am searching for in my blogging journey.As our group is growing we realize that there are people who don’t know a lot about art journaling but want to take part in our group and of course they are welcome! So now it has become a learning community also. At first the group was all doing the A Beautiful Mess course and we loved how different everyone’s pages looked from the same prompts, but soon there were too many people to expect them to be following those exact prompts with us. But then, it became an 'I don't know what to art journal about' issue. So we have the idea to provide our own prompts and do a link up to showcase everyone works and create even more community. To say it was a huge success would be an understatement.To show how fair and perfectly Caylee and I were working together on this: her blog housed the participant links, mine housed the prompts and link ups. It was little clues like this that were tipping us off to how well we worked together. When we got emails from participants about issues or questions, I handled them (I’m a social worker, so peoples problems are in my second nature to handle). When we needed to monitor links and do really tedious admin things, Caylee was so excited to do it (she is a freaking efficiency machine). We were quickly falling into a ying and yang relationship and having such a great time.We posted our first post in May 2014. By July we were sharing prompts, at the end of November we were announcing a holiday break from Get Messy and announcing that something big and new was coming. The first week of December we announced our plan for an all new Get Messy that was a focused art journaling community that would come in February of 2015. And we would be charging for it.....When I look back at this now, I cannot assure you enough how personal and small this project started. We never intended for growth like we saw and we truly, truly had no idea if anyone would show back up for a paid version of Get Messy. Soon I will tell you all about what happened in February when we opened registration, but next let me backtrack and tell you what was happening in my personal creative journey during this year of the Get Messy roots...Read Why I Am Telling My Creative Story and see each part of the story here.