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, and I built the same hand-checked index for those cities, the Bay Area and Los Angeles before this one. KraftStories has no studio in San Diego, so on this site there is nothing of ours to favour.

Running a workshop space teaches you something uncomfortable: the reason people don’t come to a class usually isn’t price or interest. It’s that they never found out it existed. That is as true of a printmaking night in Logan Heights or a wheel class in North Park as it was of our own studios.

So the rule here is the same as in the other cities: if the county’s creative, civic and outdoor programme were in one place, and it were actually correct, more people would take the class, turn up to the beach cleanup and go to the museum on its free day.

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

KraftStories has no studio in San Diego, but it does run studios in Honolulu, New York and Irvine, and those are listed in their own cities. I own studios like the ones 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.