If you have been following the shop’s social media pages you will have seen a post around the number of days it took to demolish the interior of the barber shop that was previously in the space that is now Kat’s Craft Corner. The renovations took just as many or more because of me being particular on esthetics and furnishing. It is still the quickest renovation my family and I have ever done. It took my parents 30 odd years to renovate the basement, only a few weeks for the shop, a new record. I doubt we will ever be able to beat that unless it was a small closet or powder room. I am thrilled with how the shop has come together. All my worries of not having enough product, enough bookshelves, and enough space for large numbers of people have been unwarranted. I am waking up each morning looking forward to life, looking forward to meeting new people and welcoming back those that are familiar. It feels amazing to just want to be living life again. I never thought of myself becoming a store owner or my own boss, but this has been the best change and a great community I have joined. Opening the shop has been a rush! An adrenaline rush like nothing I’ve experienced before, I’ve experienced a lot of them. My life has been engulfed in every way by the shop. I don’t know when I last had a conversation that didn’t have some component of the shop being brought up. Yet, I love it. The learning curve it presents keeps me on my toes. For example, I have been consulting with an accountant on bookkeeping and it is intimidating! Checks and balances, properly titling transactions, documenting all expenses, revenues, and overhead is daunting when you haven’t ever had to worry about balancing a book so big. It’ll be interesting to see how many months it takes me to feel confident in doing so. Thankfully, interacting with customers is somewhat natural and the part I look forward to most. Hearing the reasoning for their visit, how they heard about the shop, seeing patterns in queue to be WIPs, and seeing photos of finished projects. I love it all. Even with the unfortunate discovery of UFOs my yarn ball winder chooses to make rather than proper cakes, ‘Take me to your stash, we come in peace’. I am looking forward to what the next two weeks and onward have in store for me and the shop. What setting up classes and workshops, planning trunk shows, and continuous management of inventory with online sales will be like. Mmm, this is going to be fun!

The hunt for a brick and mortar shop in Oshawa. If you know anything about Oshawa, you’d think it would be easy to find a decent spot at a decent price to lease a retail space. It has been an adventure in itself.

Who is Kat? Hi, my full name is Katherine and I am the owner and operator of Kat’s Craft Corner. I want to take this moment to introduce myself and give insight into why I decided to open a local yarn shop and offer additional craft supplies.