Urban Craft's 1st Birthday: Presents for You!

Guys & gals: we are SO excited for the show tomorrow. I can hardly stand it! We've had such a blast putting together this show for you and cannot wait to welcome you all through the doors at 10am tomorrow! 

We've been sharing sneak peeks of all the goodies that we'll have at the show, and we decided to save the best for last. A bunch of our vendors stepped up this month to donate prizes that you can get your hands on for free! So many people offered to give you awesome gifts for free that we were able to put together not one, not two, not three, but four gift baskets for you to win! Aren't our vendors flipping fabulous? We think so!

So while the exact prizes that you can win are heavily guarded secrets until tomorrow morning, we wanted to give you a little preview of the prize packs that you can win!

Prize Pack No. 1
Alyssa Spaxman Design & Strut Gemstone Jewelry have teamed up to give you an awesome prize package that will help you adorn yourself -and- your walls (hint, hint)! 

Prize Pack No.2
VersaTile Design & Heart Meets Paper have teamed up to give you a prize pack with goodies to give and goodies to keep!

Prize Pack No.3
Eufemia Bella & Sweet Secrets have teamed up to give you something that'll give your house a perk and something that'll give you a perk!
Prize Pack No.4
And finally, Totally Squared has given us a generous gift that'll satisfy your sweet tooth for sure!

To enter to win these prizes, all you'll need to do is fill out a survey at the front door when you arrive at the show. You'll automatically be entered to win all four of the gift baskets. Totally sweet deal, don't you think!? 

And while we're at it, I'll give you another rundown of all the awesome vendors we'll have at the show tomorrow. You're already putting together your plan of attack, right!?

Koko Chocolates
Heart Meets Paper
Red Door Provisions
Eufemia Bella
Purple Urchin
VersaTile Design
Kokobaru Creations
Jasmine Virani Jewelry
Strut Gemstone Jewelry
Magneties
Urbanite Jewelry
Salvage Jewelry Co.
Flights of Fancy
Sapling//Seedling
Sweet Secrets
Flo Glass Blowing
Clever Plumage
Winged Beast Outfitters
Bake Mob
Totally Squared
Hummingbird Chocolate
Indie*Go Designs
Yakety Yak Designs

We'll see you tomorrow morning, guys & gals! Remember: get there early and line up to snag some swag ! 

Urban Craft's First Birthday Bash!
Saturday, September 1st
10am-2pm
The GCTC (1233 Wellington Street W, at Holland) 

Urban Craft: The Windy Edition!

Gorgeous coasters from VersaTile Designs

Every month, as we get closer and closer to Urban Craft, we begin to watch the weather closely to see if Mother Nature is going to give us some awesome weather for the day of the show. We are always so excited to see temperatures in the plus side of things, and are even more excited when there's a chance of sunshine on the day. This has especially been the case since we launched our monthly market in the fall, and temperatures have only gotten colder and colder as the months have progressed (boy are we looking forward to Spring)! As we watched the weather in advance of the March show this past weekend, we became pretty excited as the 90% chance of rain we were supposed to get turned into a 20% chance and the projected temperatures began to rise. Total score!

Golden Triangle T-Shirt From Apt. 613

It seems as though Mother Nature had something completely different in mind for us on Saturday. As we began to set up the event on the day of the show, blustery winds blew in and began gusting up to 90 kilometers per hour! Balloons were ripped off strings; we lost a few sandwich boards to damage, and every vendor who entered looked a little more than windblown.

But should you ever question whether or not Ottawans are a tough and resilient folk, we have an easy answer for that: hundreds of people came out to the show. They were certainly windblown but happy to be inside and shop! And we were more than happy to see them, too!

Gorgeous glass pendants from Water Willow Designs

We expanded the number of crafters selling at Urban Craft for the first time this Saturday. Because of overwhelming demand from vendors and requests from the public for more vendors to shop from, we introduced half tables in order to add some new vendors to the mix. It was an experiment of sorts and seemed to work very well; we are still working on tweaking the setup and figuring things out as we go! We are so excited about how this show continues to grow in vendors and people. We are a lucky bunch!

Sewn goodies from Winged Beast Outfitters

Colorful cases from My Stow -n- Tow

Gorgeous modern pouches from Prairie Girl Creations

Our next show is coming up on April 7th! Here's hoping Mother Nature will bestow a gorgeous, sunny spring day on us then!

Our Feature in The Ottawa Citizen

At the beginning of last week, I got a call from an editor at The Ottawa Citizen whom we've worked with before. She mentioned she'd been wanting to do a piece on Urban Craft since we launched, and thought now would be the perfect time to do so. We were more than happy to oblige, obviously, and found out our piece was to run on Friday or Saturday--right before the November edition of the show!

On Friday, the piece ran and in the midst of our day-before-the-show prep, we found the article online and I was pretty over the moon excited. I didn't think it could get any better until we picked up a copy on Saturday and saw that the article was a full half-page big and included images from Anne-Marie Bouchard of AMBPhoto, one of our very favorite photographers to work with in Ottawa. We were thrilled and so thankful for the article. You can read it here: Shop Local At Ottawa's Urban Craft.