Cape Town Rocks Facebook group was started on the Easter weekend of 2017 and this is the story of how it all began.
I took part a 100-Day creative challenge which my sister Chelsea introduced me to. The creative challenge was to paint or write, or do any creative activity for 100 consecutive days and to post the results to a New Zealand website. After much experimentation, I settled on the challenge to paint 100 mandalas onto pebbles and post them to the site, one a day, for 100 days. They came out beautifully and I wanted to do something fun and interesting with the 100 painted pebbles. I was chatting to Chelsea and family and we thought to create something similar to a Geocache concept where people could find the rocks and log their find.
We thought that a website should be created for logging the rocks that were found. Then Chelsea messaged me the following morning, a group had come up on her Facebook feed, it was a New Zealand group on Facebook, who were painting and hiding rocks. We contacted Claudia over messenger and she explained how the kindness rocks concept worked. You simply paint pebbles and leave them in open, public areas for random strangers to find. The idea is that the stranger will get a delightful surprise and they can either re-hide the painted rock or keep it.
This fitted in so well to what we had been discussing so Chelsea and I started the Cape Town Rocks group and our cousin Ilma hid the very first rock on Easter Saturday 2017, on Chapman’s Peak.
We discovered that there was also a Rock Painting Facebook group in Ohio (quite a big one) doing the same thing. According to Wikipedia, the concept originally started in 2015 in Cape Cod.
We added our immediate friends to the group and Cape Town Rocks started growing in the area that it was started, which is Capri Village, near Fish Hoek. We hid painted rocks in Capri, Fish Hoek, Glencairn and Kommetjie and posted them to the group. All the painted rocks have a back label which tells the finder that they can keep it or re-hide it, and to post their find to the Facebook group. The group grew slowly and more and more people started painting and hiding rocks. The group now has over 20 000 members, some of them from all over the world.
Related Rock Painting Groups
Other groups started sprouting up all over the country and in the last year, specially since lockdown, the concept has gained traction. Labels for some of the groups can be found at this link.
Here’s a list of groups which are mostly based in South Africa, some have originated from Cape Town Rocks, some have sprouted up on their own. If you would like to follow any of these Facebook groups, just add yourself, add friends and family too if they’re in that area.
- Ballito Rocks
- Durban Rocks
- Exploring South Coast – KZN Rocks
- Happiness Rocks SW13
- Hazyview Rock
- Israel Rocks
- Joburg Rocks
- KZN Rocks
- KNYSNA ROCKS
- Langebaan Rocks
- Milnerton Rocks
- Noord Brabant Rocks (Netherlands)
- O Pebbles [Overberg Pebbles]
- PE Rocks
- Pretoria Rocks
- Rolling Rock’ers
- RocksZA
- Southern Cape Rocks
- St Lucia Rocks
- Swartland Rocks
- West Coast Rocks (South Africa)
How Rock Paint started
About two years after Cape Town Rocks started, we decided to bring out a range of our own top quality paints and rock painting related products – Rock Paint was launched in December 2018 and is run as a family business, taking great care to offer good quality products and excellent service. Our core business is Graphic design, Packaging design, Illustration and WordPress e-commerce sites, so we could design our product labels and website ourselves. We were fortunate with our resources and have an excellent, local paint maker who helped us set up the Rock Paint product, thank you Calvin and Rosslyn.