Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Two crafters walk into a bar late at night. One’s got some T-shirts, and one’s got some stained glass. For both of them, already, this is more than just a hobby.
Twenty years later, they’re successfully living their scrappy dreams, having helped to build a community 100-crafters strong, and about to swing open big heavy doors to let in a weekend’s cascade of holiday shoppers sure to surpass 10,000 into a space that’s as big as an NHL hockey rink, chock-full of diverse and multi-generational makers, artists, and fellow dreamers.
“It’s just one giant party,” says Bethany Nixon, owner of Reware Vintage in Berkley and cofounder of Handmade Detroit, the organization that hosts next weekend’s Detroit Urban Craft Fair, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. “[It’s] a party of creative people and people who love creative people — it’s such a celebration of the things that people in the metro Detroit area make, and I’m just so happy to be part of it.”
This holiday season, Detroit Urban Craft Fair returns Dec. 6-7 to the Drill Hall inside Detroit’s historic Masonic Temple, allowing shoppers to discover and connect with local makers and one-of-a-kind finds, while enjoying festive (and often eclectic) holiday music and family-friendly crafts. For many, it’s an opportunity to get the entire season’s worth of shopping done in one day, and on a budget to boot. It’s also a chance to be outright charmed by copious amounts of crafters and their personalities.
“It’s that buzz of Christmas morning,” says Carey Gustafson, owner of Glass Action! Studio in Oak Park, the other cofounder of Handmade Detroit. “It’s that energy of making your way through the house and peeking around the corner and getting your eyes on that lit tree and those extra boxes that weren’t there the day before — that sense of wonder and excitement is the energy I feel when we open those doors, when this weekend kicks off!”
The big weekend
Once November hits, the entirety of Nixon and Gustafson’s weekends, as well as their weeknights, are consumed by a focus on prep. “We’ve joked for years,” Nixon says, “that our unofficial motto is ‘no sleep till DUCF’ because there’s always so much to do, so many things to take care of before the big weekend.” She adds that the night before can be summed up as “a lot of nervousness and excitement and coffee combined all into one.”
Gustafson describes the two weeks leading up to DUCF as akin to “those dreams where you fall and then jerk yourself awake, like you’re gonna fall out of bed. Albeit, after all these years, we do have a skeletal framework to plan from, but each year all the line-items from that format are different. We know what we’re doing and how it’s going to look, and feel; the anticipation is amazing, but then there’s so many other ‘oh no’s and ‘what’s that’ and ‘what just happened’ and ‘is this OK’ and ‘are they coming’… which totally keeps us on our toes.”
Each year, several Handmade Detroit staff members and volunteers assist Nixon and Gustafson in coordinating the load in and arrangement of more than 100 vendors, each bringing their own unique parameters for their spaces and booths, and all of them stylishly shambling up into the Masonic Temple’s third floor mezzanine via elevators built in the 1920s — several on different timelines and schedules, steadily navigating into a 17,000-square-f00t space designed for military marching band rehearsals like a giant game of Tetris.
“And then there’s sponsors, and caterers, and our DJ, it’s a lot of cogs,” says Nixon. “Every person plays a part. It’s almost like a giant band or orchestra, playing together and making some beautiful things happen.”
Gustafson describes the week leading up to “the show” as a chaotic ballet, with “everything from calls for all-hands-on-deck to rolly carts zooming around, to last-minute parking strategies, and then all of our vendors start arriving.” Gustafson says that it always works out, but then again, sometimes there’s stuff they just can’t predict.
“Doing a show for such a small window of time at one of the most iconic buildings in the city presents a lot of unknowns,” says Gustafson. “We can plan down to the tiniest minutiae of what we need but sometimes we show up and there are parties booked, or weddings happening, or one year, [in 2012] Eminem decided to shoot a music video in the cathedral theatre downstairs for that entire week! When [the Masonic] gets that kind of call, that slightly shifts what we’re walking into. But we love the Masonic, we wouldn’t go back year after year if they weren’t absolutely incredible to work with.”
Crafting and punk go hand-in-hand
Handmade Detroit started when five women, each crafters with unique modalities, styles, and backgrounds, met in 2004 inside the Garden Bowl during a local vintage market pop-up known as Baar Bazaar. That’s where Nixon and Gustafson met Lish Dorset, Stephanie Tardy Duimstra, and Amy Cronkite, along with her husband Ethan. “I was so excited to meet other similar women and just wanted to be friends with them,” says Nixon. “They were all already working on the idea of [DUCF] by the time I met them, and asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. For me, all of this started from just wanting to be a part of the creative community in Detroit.”
Nixon was always making things as a kid, walking to the now-bygone Frank’s Nursery in Sterling Heights after school to buy craft supplies with allowance money. “One day my brother gave me a stack of records and said I should do something with them — I decided to make notebooks with them,” she says. Nixon also credits a “crafty” cousin who was an antiques dealer, introducing her to eBay in 1998, “which is how I got started selling vintage band T-shirts,” she says. “I had literally just launched my website [rewarevintage.com] the week before I met all the Detroit Urban Craft Fair ladies.”
Speaking of band T-shirts, Nixon says, “it’s really music that brings us all together.” The milieu of the Garden Bowl and its usual clientele during the first assemblage of what became Handmade Detroit, vending their wares on checkered linoleum floors as local and touring bands lugged amps up to the upstairs Magic Stick, manifested a mash-up of vintage shoppers and music fans that felt, perhaps unsurprisingly, harmonious.
“For me it’s always been about my family’s love of music and of making things that shaped the rest of my life,” Nixon says. “And I’ve personally always considered DIY and crafting to be an element of punk — I think the two go hand-in-hand. You see so much in common in those scenes. It was happenstance because I had gone to the Garden Bowl for a Raveonettes concert and the very first Baar Bazaar just happened to be that night, so there were all these people slinging handmade things.”
“Handmade Detroit felt like being in a band,” Gustafson says. “Everyone had a skill they were best at, and they were the ones that did that for the group.” Gustafson did play in a couple bands around the scene in the early 2000s, but her creative life started with drawing as a child, particularly portraiture. Gustafson nearly graduated late from high school because “I had too many art credits — I had to make-up an algebra class.” After high school, she freelanced for and then was hired by a stained glass company that needed someone who could draw. The rest, essentially, is history, leading to Glass Action’s now two-decade run of stained glass design and repair, as well as classes.
On the nature of scrappy, DIY-punk energy, Gustafson says, “we were young and just inside of so many different threads of so many different communities going on — there was always someone to grab to help or someone to host something. And in Detroit, no one waits for a handout — you find a way to make that costume, make that party, you don’t wait, you go make something! So we wanted to develop a system so that crafters would have an opportunity to make a little extra cash, to work toward something, and sometimes something on a calendar can get you motivated.”
Handmade Detroit hosted its own large-scale pop-up with 53 vendors inside the Majestic Theater in 2006: thus the Detroit Urban Craft Fair was born. Nixon says the initial intent was to pick a name that implied that this wasn’t your Grandma’s craft show, but their initial pick of “Detroit Indie Craft Fair” led to an acronym that sounded too close to an inappropriate word.
“We were scrappy kids,” Nixon says. “We made pins to sell for fundraising to cover our expenses for putting on the show. But after that first DUCF, all five of us were just smiling the entire damn night. It was so fun to see it come together — the community that embraced it and local press covering it — it was just this little idea that started in a bar.”
Tradition and endurance
Twenty years ago, yeah, eBay was a thing, and Etsy was just kind of getting started, but DUCF was growing in a pre-Pinterest world, long before the “shop small” mentality and “buy local” campaigns gained ground. Sheesh, forget about a Linktree — the women of Handmade Detroit were on Myspace, and just happy to have their own PayPals.
What keeps an endeavor like DUCF going strong, Nixon says, is community. It’s more than Modge Podge or Washi Tape that helps crafters stick together. There’s, if you will, a common thread: “It really is a community,” Nixon says. “I think when you’re so passionate about your art, your craft, and you meet other people who might do something completely different but also creative — sharing that passion causes instant community. Every year, we meet new people in the creative community, and it’s like each year we’re throwing a party: ‘come meet our new friends and see what they do!’”
“It’s counter culture, too” Gustafson says, calling back to Nixon’s punk reference. “Handmade Detroit survived the recession, then we pivoted through the pandemic, and a couple of pretty tumultuous political climates, but shopping local, supporting local, that always resonates because it’s real. Museums are full of folk art, from thousands of years of people making and expressing themselves through handiwork. Some people love it, some don’t understand it, but what we’ve found with this show is that we have the best shoppers in the nation.”
“The people who come out to shop [at DUCF] are so warm and thoughtful and excited,” Gustafson says. “We do get some who elbow each other and say, ‘oh YOU could make that,’ but it’s rare.”
What’s not rare is repeat customers. “Its a tradition for so many people, now,” Nixon says. “We hear it over and over, that it’s become a tradition that’s part of the holiday season for families, couples, friends to come to DUCF. We had someone tell us that their friends group went every single year together, but that when one of them moved across the country, they decided that she would fly home for DUCF, so that she could still be part of that tradition. That made me tear up.”
Doors open next at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 6, a time “designed for our serious shoppers,” Gustafson says, as they’ll not only get first dibs on the work, but also the chance at “swag bags” for the first 50 guests through the door. The afternoon is an ideal time for family visitors, with auxiliary “kids zone” craft activities and plenty of food vendors, then the night leans into a “party atmosphere.” Sunday evening wraps with a “dance party” led by DJ Dave Lawson and his quirky Christmas 45s.
“At DUCF, there’s truly something for everybody,” Gustafson says. “It’s this cross-pollination of generations and vibes and themes and interests and kitsch. And you can see the quality in the work. It’s just so exciting every year to see the show come together.”
The Detroit Urban Craft Fair runs from 11 a.m.-7 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 6, and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 7; Masonic Temple, 500 Temple St., Detroit; detroiturbancraftfair.com. Cover is $5 (no cover for children under 12 after 1 p.m.)
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This article appears in Nov. 26-Dec. 9, 2025.