Renegade Craft Fair Chicago

I've lived in Chicago 7 years, and somehow with busyness, going out of town, or just flat out forgetting, I hadn't yet made it to the Renegade Craft Fair. Big mistake. Big. Huge. So Alex and I went on Saturday afternoon. I was excited; Alex was indifferent but willing to oblige before heading to our date he planned for the evening. When we arrived, Alex was at the Kevin Tong Illustration booth in an instant, checking out the Jurassic Park and Breaking Bad posters. Four hours later, our pennies were all spent and our previous date plans were postponed.

The booths were endless. We traveled down Division from Damen to Paulina, stopping or glancing into nearly every booth.

Of course the first purchase we made was for Tobias. Our kitty is a red line kitty. They also sell an amazing Sears Tower cat scratcher that was a bit out of the kitty toy budget, unfortunately.

I snuck a photo of these beautiful refurbished mid-century modern chairs at the vintage section of the fair. They had been reupholstered with vintage curtains.

After we had seen all the booths, we dragged our tired feet to the car to drop off our new purchases and then headed back to Division Street to find some dinner. Once we saw Folklore and remembered it to be the sister restaurant of Tango Sur, we were sold.

I had a delicious cocktail from their summer specials list. Ingredients included pureed cucumber and fresh basil. Alex tried the Quilmes beer. They did the trick to wash down our steaks and empanadas.

I bought a great Renegade Craft Fair t-shirt on Saturday. When I realized how big the size small was, I bought the XS. When I got it home and tried it on, it was a bit of a body suit so I found the excuse to return on Sunday to exchange the shirt and snag a cherry cola snow cone while I was there. ;)

We picked up so many business cards on Saturday that I can barely remember all the booths they came from. I'll be sifting back through them to explore the artists' websites and report back with the findings.

DIY Save the Date

It took me quite a long time to determine what our wedding save the dates would be, but I did know from the start that I wanted them to be on a postcard and that I wanted to avoid a cheeseball photo of us. My favorite idea was using a postcard from the city where we'd get married and writing the details on the back, like this and this. The problem in our case, though, is that we're getting married in a small rural town outside of the suburbs of Chicago. Not outside of the city, outside of the suburbs. When I Googled for postcards, I found maybe one postcard of a railroad track.

My next idea for a postcard image was to find something with a nice wedding-like image. When that was unsuccessful, we thought about making our own postcards using a photo of the venue. By this time, it was mid-November, and I started thinking about using a Christmas greeting as our postcard.

So I found these. And this awesome DIY idea for a vintage save the date using a stamp you can customize yourself from Ruffledblog.com.

And last night, I completed these!

We bought the stamp kit from Staples for about $30. I wasn't happy with the way the felt stamp pad was working, so I bought a foam one for about $2 from Blick that worked much better. The kit came with a small and a large stamp, so we used the small one for the greeting and the large one for the information.

I did end up with a few cards where the stamp didn't come out even, so it's a good idea to have a few extra postcards just in case.

Next step, postage and addresses.