Hello Craft is proud to be working with the Washington City Paper to power this year’s Crafty Bastards Arts and Crafts Fair! As most festivals go, Crafty Bastards takes six months to a year to plan and produce. With 150+ craft vendors, local sponsors, a food court, the BBoy Battle and more than 25,000 people attending the fair, the stakes are high to design and execute an event that is both a one-of-a-kind shopping experience for the people of DC, and a promotional and profitable success for our vendors.

After receiving many questions over the years of how Crafty Bastards is put together, we’re starting this new weekly column that will give you an exclusive, insider’s look into the work that goes into creating this fair. As part of our commitment to education, Hello Craft staff will take turns sharing their trials and tribulations of being Festival Directors. We welcome all questions and comments, and hope that our experiences will inspire those looking to organize their own crafting events, as well as share common ground with those who already put on some of the most fantastic events around the country.

And so the Crafty Bastards adventure begins with our very first Diary entry…..

Hello All! I’m Kimberly, the Executive Director of Hello Craft as well as one of the main Festival Directors of Crafty Bastards. I’ve worked on this fair for the last 7 years, and am always excited to jump into the planning stages. Just to give you some background on the work I do for Crafty Bastards: If you send an email to Crafty Bastards, I’m the one you’ll hear from. I do most of the ordering and permit work for the fair, I’m on the jury, I coordinate logistics with Washington City Paper, round up Hello Craft Sponsors, and work with Sara (who you’ll hear from in future diary entries), to map out our vendor spaces and make sure that all of our vendors and shoppers get the best day-of experience.

Thursday, June 24th, 10pm
Finally(!) relaxing after a crazy and super hot day running all over DC to get our permit signatures for our DCRA (Dept. of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs) Special Events Permit. Hosting an outdoor event in DC means getting event permits. Getting permits means getting a whole slew of signatures from various government agencies from the Fire Marshall’s Office and the Metropolitan Police Department, to the Office of Tax and Revenue and DC Public Space. Basically, we need government approval to put on this fair in the form of signatures, which require a bit of running around town. The DCRA office moved to the SW Waterfront area from their N. Capitol Street location just recently, which is good because it’s right next to the Metro (and because they added computer stations that have a decent internet connection to help you pass the time while in the waiting rooms – so yay!) but bad because it means that I also have to go to one more stop on my way to getting other signatures at N. Capitol Street, Judiciary Square, Columbia Heights, New York Avenue and L Street NW…. c’est la vie. At least the folks in those government offices get a chuckle every time I tell them the name of our fair

With 90% of my permit signatures in hand after a sweaty day using public transportation to get to all the government offices around town, Sara takes me out to the Wonderland Ballroom for a celebratory beer (thank you Sara!).

Just a few more tiny festival logistics to work out before I finish the last part of the permit process. This includes drawing up a site plan as well as a traffic flow pattern.  I am feeling happy about getting a majority of this work done today. More on permitting down the road.

Sunday, July 4th, Midnight
Today is the FINAL, LAST DAY for folks to get in their applications. It’s always fun to see the last few applications come in right at deadline. I’m a guilty procrastinator, so it makes me smile to see that there are others just like me out there in the crafty world. Every application is counted, whether it’s the first one that came in months ago, to the very last one that got in the door with 10 seconds to spare.

Monday, July 5th, 12:30pm
Had to manually enter in a few applications that could not get through the application process because of weird web reasons that are beyond my level of understanding. These are important because we don’t want anyone not to be able to apply just because of web issues. Once all is said and done, we’ll research the problems so that they can be fixed for next year’s application.

I’m reviewing all the applications to make sure that everyone is paid up and also checking out photos to see if there are any issues, such as missing photos. Just looked over a plush application that shows off cute squishy things, with a few WTF (hilarious) ones mixed in. I love seeing photos of work from crafters that are truly unconventional. My wish (as always) is to see more handmade clothing for dudes. It’s one of the biggest requests that we hear from shoppers every year.

I can’t wait for the Crafty Jury this weekend! Check out the Crafty Bastards Blog on Friday to see the bios of this year’s Crafty Jury members, as well as an inside look into how the jury works. Good luck to all of our applicants!