We built the list we couldn’t find

Why a studio owner built this

I’m Nurullah. I run KraftStories, craft studios in Honolulu, New York and Irvine. The Irvine one is at 2126 Spectrum, near UCI, where people make one thing in one sitting: a mosaic lamp, a terrarium, a moss wall or a soy candle.

Running a workshop space teaches you something uncomfortable about this industry: the reason people don’t come to your class usually isn’t price or interest. It’s that they never found out it existed. That is as true of a ceramics class in Tustin or a trail restoration morning in Laguna Canyon as it is of ours.

So this started selfishly and turned into something else. If the whole county’s creative and outdoor programme were in one place, and it were actually correct, more people would take a class or turn up to a planting day. Some of them would come to us. Most of them wouldn’t, and that’s fine — a directory that only worked when it sent people to me wouldn’t be a directory.

What makes this different from the other lists

Everything here is read off the organiser’s own website by a person. Not scraped from an aggregator, not copied from another blog, not generated, and there are no automated feeds. When a studio prints a date with no year on it, someone works out the year from the printed weekday. When a booking page says a class is full, we say it is full.

That work is unglamorous and it’s the entire product. The editorial standards page spells out the specific rules, including the ones we wrote after getting something wrong.

The obvious conflict

I own one of the studios listed here. That’s disclosed on every page of this site, our own workshops are marked as ours, and our competitors are listed in full — including when they’re cheaper. There’s no paid placement and nobody can buy a better position. If you want the longer version of how we handle it, it’s on the standards page.