Blog

When starting this venture I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. It will be a lot of work, a lot of effort, and if I want it to succeed it will all rely on me. That is the territory that comes with being a sole proprietor. No surprise. I am lucky in that I have had past experience and education in business administration and marketing. Yet the tasks of accounting, even with the guidance of a family member, and managing all the various hats is exhausting. Thank goodness for coffee and tea! While these realities are no shock. They are just that, realities that I have to face head on. I have found myself sitting and staring at an excel sheet for hours on end with the hopes that it will look less daunting. I have stared at the 2025 calendar and forced my brain to race on the various ways I can make my shop relevant to national and global calendar celebrations. I have opened my heart to pour whatever good lies within it to the public. Hoping to draw in the community of Oshawa. It may never seem like I am doing enough, or that I am organized enough, but I feel the appreciation of those that come into the shop. The few that have attended socials, the first KAL, and impromptu sit and stitches may not seem like much, but to me it is wonderful! I was able to provide a space for those individuals to enjoy themselves. A place to escape their worries and create. I wake up every morning with the hopes that my actions encourage others to learn something new without having the feeling of being alone in doing so. This is what I mean by ‘I feel the appreciation’. I see those that enjoy the space and activities as much as I do and it makes my heart grow. Regardless of the uncertainty around us all in the world, of the expected reduction of income facing my family and I from this venture, and the fatigue from the rollercoaster of energy to no energy and back. I am more happy, motivated, and empowered than I ever have been. I feel immense pride in what I have accomplished and hope to continue to accomplish in the coming months. I am a Canadian bi-sexual woman of mixed race with a chronic mental health illness who owns a small business in a niche market and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Best two months of my life thus far. Thank you everyone that has graced my shop with your presence. I look forward to more encounters and good times.   

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.