Special Saturday Post: Astoria Craft Party

Well Hello Everyone!

Sorry no feature on Friday, we were having a blast over at the Astoria Craft Party.

This event was created by Etsy as a way to bring crafters together to demonstrate what they do.  So our focus wasn't really selling stencils, but showing people how to stencil.  We brought three different size bags and two different size pallet signs.  I talked about the pallet signs a few weeks ago. 

Since there's never been an event like this in Astoria, we weren't really sure what to expect.  We didn't know how many people we'd have, if they'd like our product.  We thought at worst, we'd get to hang out in an awesome venue for a few hours with some great artists.  As it turns out, stencil fans started showing up 15 minutes before the event started and we never stopped!  It was a huge success!

 

The event was held in the taproom of the Fort George Brewery, which is a popular public house and brewery here in Astoria.  It's an amazing space.  Check out this angel who hung out in the corner and oversaw things.  Laura and I were obsessed with these barrels they have everywhere.  Covetous even.  We will have one, one day! 

 

We probably had about 75 people walk away with something they made with our stencils, which is awesome.  We only had one 12x18 stencil with us, so lots of people improvised and threw together 12x12 and 6x12s on our big signs.  We were continually impressed with how creative and inventive our budding artists were. 

How cute are these little bags?  The kids loved these.  We had little Dala Horses, little moose, and a small key to stencil on there.

It's a lot of fun teaching people to stencil because there's such a great "reveal" moment when you peel back the mylar and see what the end result is.  Here's one of our young artists painting the Maison stencil onto a 6x12.  Her brother later added to it.   It was a collaborative effort!

Our Astoria subway stencil got a workout.  It looked so great on bags and signs.  We're going to add this one to the store because we had quite a few people interested in purchasing it.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the other amazing artisans who were present.  We had a blacksmith who brought his mobile shop, a glass blower who made ornaments (gorgeous, no?), pinback buttons, papercraft, rag dolls, a silver stamper (we wanted one of these spoons badly and never had a chance, she was too popular), fabric dyeing, photo walks, picture frame crafting, and my most favorite shop in all of Astoria, Vintage Hardware did all kinds of repurposing crafts. 

It was a total blast.  Where else can you hang out, have some really great beer, meet crafty people, and talk about stencils?  Only in Astoria.  :)