Observations Getting crafty with your Christmas shopping

Everyone at the City Of Craft fair is your friend. They’re all folks who would knit you a scarf, draw their own Christmas cards, or screen-print a custom T-shirt for you. Or, at the very least, they’d buy you something DIY and one-of-a-kind like that. People are friendly, the food—well, the one table of food—is freshly baked, and even the soap you wash your hands with in the Theatre Centre’s bathrooms was handmade by a vendor in the room. (Good job, table 39.) Even if the claustrophobically small space dampens your mood, the City Of Craft fair is the kind of place that you leave feeling jolly, whether you realize it or not. (This warm-fuzzy sense of holiday mirth will also distract you from how much money you actually spent.)

City of Craft is just one of the many Christmas one-stop-shop options Toronto hosts every year in December—a crop of the city’s craftiest artists holed up in theatre spaces, church basements, and other accommodating spaces all over town. Missed out? Don’t worry. Most of these vendors probably have Etsy shops.

The local craft scene—usually sprawling and ambiguous, finding its centre at one-off shows and yarn depositories—becomes highly concentrated this time of year. If vendors look familiar, it’s probably because they’ve been at one, two, maybe four other craft shows. In that sense, it is like running into an old friend. Or an old acquaintance you only tangentially know and whose name you can never remember. At the heart of these fairs is a burgeoning community of young and creative crafters, people willing to add some witty flare to what one would otherwise deem to be a type of thing only your grandmother would be into. But this is not your grandmother’s craft show. Knitwear is worn fashionably, bunting flags are cool, and witty card tags that say “I Think of You When I Masturbate,” and “You Ruin Everything” are definitely not made for the more matronly oldsters in your family, no matter how beloved.  

For the more traditional, grandmother-friendly craft fair, though, there’s always the One Of A Kind Show: the old guard of Toronto craft-stravaganzas. One Of A Kind is the cornucopia of established crafters, where fruitcake lovers flock and Christmas sweaters are donned without the slightest traces of irony. No need to squeeze your way through narrow lanes of busy shoppers there; each lane at this annual event at the Exhibition Place is wide and carpeted for your strolling needs. Also, if kids’ fashion shows and overpriced slices of Pizza Pizza is your thing, then you’re home.

As you might expect with either spectrum of craft showery, prices are a bit of an eyesore. But we’re talking about handmade pieces of work, not pre-fab, factory-made, stretched-out Pepsi bottles and googly-eyed walnuts. Vendors have to cobble together a hundred bucks just for the privilege of renting a table. With a $2 admission fee for City Of Craft, most of the tables were reasonably priced with $4 cards and $30 screen-printed posters for sale. But at the One Of A Kind show, with an admission fee of $14, you should prepare to shell out hundreds of dollars on leather bags, hand-carved pepper mills, and even paintings. With booth rental rates as high as $6000, you bet these vendors want their money’s worth. A slice of pizza alone is more expensive than getting into City Of Craft.

Still, it beats the dreadful hustle-bustle of Eaton Centre or other malls dotting the city’s periphery. So put down those Chapter’s and Banana Republic gift cards and step out of the malls this holiday. We live in a city of crafts waiting to be explored.