Part 9: How a 100 Day Project Became the Next Great Thing

This is the ninth post in a series about how The Willa Workshops on willawanders.com came to be.

Part 9

During the year that The Bookmaker Collective was happening, I still had plenty of time to explore other making to my heart’s content. One of the processes that really drew me in big time was making handmade collage fodder.

Not only did I love having a big stash of my own hand painted and marked up papers and fabrics, I fell madly in love with the process. Not just because it was cool, but because it brought me a sense of peace and calm. I could get totally and utterly lost in making collage fodder.

I imagine that this is the reason why some people like to drink alcohol or do drugs. They understandably want that escape from their mind. Drugs and alcohol just aren’t my jam, my system is too sensitive for those things to have the effect one is looking for.

But all I need to do is to start putting marks on a big pile of paper (or even just a small pile of paper) and I am given that escape hatch.

So when the 100 Day Project for 2021 was rolling around again, it was a total no brainer for me: I was going to do 100 Days of Collage Fodder. I’m fairly certain that I wasn’t the only artist who had that idea because I distinctly remember having DM conversations with Megan Quinlan about the project. I’m certain other people were doing it as well.

Not only did I love the feeling that came over me, that total flow state, when doing repetitive making, I was smitten with is this idea that making your own collage materials was really a way to uplevel you mixed media art.

I had been exposed to this methodology in many, many places along my relatively short mixed media journey, and I thought it would be a fun project to do for 100 days that would help me to grow as an artist. I certainly had no idea when I began that 100 Day what would end up transpiring.

As soon as that 100 Day ended, Tiffany Sharpe reached out to me. She said that she was feeling like people needed idea for what to do with all of their collage fodder and that she wanted to do something, she wasn’t sure what, but that she had already thought of a hashtag, #fodder challenge, and would I be interested in collaborating with her?

That’s it. That’s what she had. A hashtag and a dream of collaborating with someone, possibly me, to try to do something cool. So naturally I was like, “I’m too busy to provide you much help, but I sure want to support whatever dream you have Tifffany.”

And, like the universe tends to do, it basically dropped all of the instructions for how to run Fodder Challenge into my brain, all in one big dump.

So I went back to Tiffany and I said something like this, “I know that I told you that I don’t have time to help you, but here’s exactly what we should do and exactly how we should do it.”

Now I know what you might be thinking. Wendy, you just said you couldn’t get very involved. Why are you ignoring your intuition and going back on what you just told Tiffany?

I can only say that when the universe gives you an obvious present, you just take it and say thank you.

I called Tiffany and I said, here’s what we need to do. And she basically said, “Yes to all of that,” and off we went. Tiffany did most of the recruiting of other mixed media artists to join in and teach in this free offering and I went about making it all happen in the backend on The Willa Workshops.

It was a big success. I mean, it was free, so who turns down a great free offering, right? But it was way bigger than anyone could have imagined because people were actually doing to lessons. They weren’t just signing up. They were inspired to create.

As soon as I saw people’s reactions, I knew exactly what we needed to do: we needed to offer up this as a year long experience with twelve different instructors.

Now, before you go off thinking that this all just sounds so easy, I would like to point out the huge risk that Tiffany and I took when we launched this thing. It’s one thing to be a teacher in a collaborative course. It’s another to agree to admin the whole thing before one sale ever comes through the shopping cart. It didn’t matter how many people signed up for Fodder School, Tiffany and I were locked into a full 14 months of work on this offering.

Really everyone was taking a risk. From the other ten teachers who agreed to create a full course for the program, to the participants who were trusting us to deliver value for their registration money, it was a risk.

A new business venture is like a wild horse. At least that’s what all of my experiences have been like. At first, everything is kinda crazy. You don’t even know if you like the people that you’ve agreed to collaborate with. You barely know them because no one even lives in the same state.

All sorts of stuff happens and you break shit. People don’t know what’s gonna transpire and if that horse is ever gonna get trained, so it’s all just one high risk endeavour.

Me and my crazy ideas . . . the first year of Fodder School was a like a bucking bronco.

To be continued . . .

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