This fall, Houston-area stationery shop Little Craft Place hosted their third festival for Texans who love to scrapbook. “Little Craft Fest” returned October 23 – 25 — this time with a spooky Halloween twist. There were 120 different vendor booths, dozens of expert-led craft workshops, and thousands of junk journalers coming together from all over the state to celebrate all things stationery.
Here’s how my own experience went attending Spooky Little Craft Fest and adding to my extensive collection of craft supplies!
VIP Weekend Passes vs. Day Passes
Visitors can choose between two different options when purchasing tickets to Little Craft Fest: 3-Day Passes with early entry to the marketplace, or 1-Day Passes with various time slots.
3-Day Passes also include a gift bag full of items donated by various stationery businesses and artists that is meant to be valued at ~$65-70.
When I went to Little Craft Fest for the first time back in April of this year, I opted for a ~$35 timed 1-Day Pass because I wasn’t sure what to expect from the event yet. But for Spooky Little Craft Fest in October, I decided to splurge on a 3-Day pass for ~$120.
Here are a few reasons why I would recommend the 3-Day Pass, if it’s within your budget:
The Merch Bag
I think they did a very good job living up to the promise of the bag’s value this time around because they included an exclusive Soolla journal pouch designed by the company specifically for the festival. Pouches in the same size and style on the Soolla website retail for ~$50. The items inside included a sticker book, event keepsakes like a photo frame magnet, a keychain, and a journal clip, Midliner pens, washi tape, and more. Part of the appeal for me was also that I really loved the featured artist “The Ghost Egg” and her spooky cute designs on all of the event flyers and merch. If the gift bag is a factor in your decision about which tickets to buy, I definitely recommend doing research on the official event artist to see if their style and products resonate with you first!
Early Entry
If you’ve ever been to Little Craft Fest, then you know that the festival’s popularity is starting to outgrow its venue a little bit. The marketplace inside the Hyatt Regency Conroe’s ballroom is jam packed with vendor tables and gets VERY crowded with attendees by the afternoon each day. The crowds can be overstimulating, so it was really helpful to enter an hour early with my VIP wristband and get at least some of my shopping done before it was too hectic.
Going with the Flow
One more luxury of the 3-Day Pass was that it felt like a lot less pressure to rush around and get to everything since I knew I would be back the following day. I took my time stamping my journal at free stamp stations (more on this later), snapping photos of the adorable fall decor at vendor booths, and prioritizing a break to eat lunch and rest my feet for a few minutes in the middle of the day.
With all of that being said, if you need to save money and forgo the 3-Day Pass in order to use as much of your budget as possible on shopping, you can still have a fantastic time at the festival!
If you can only pick one day to attend, here are a few different pros and cons to think about:
- Friday – You’ll have the first pick from the available merch! Both times I attended Little Craft Fest, plenty of the vendors ran completely out of stock for certain popular items by early Saturday morning. If there are specific items you know ahead of time you want to buy, I would choose this day pass.
- Saturday – Stock will be a little bit more limited than Friday, but obviously not as much as it will on Sunday. And if you work full-time, you won’t have to use any PTO to be there. This was the day pass I bought for my first LCF experience.
- Sunday – I have never actually attended on Sunday myself, but I have heard that many of the vendors heavily discount their remaining items on this day so that they can clear out their stock before traveling home. If you aren’t picky about tracking down specific items and you want to stick to a smaller budget, Sunday would be the perfect opportunity to do that.
No matter which day you choose to attend, I recommend buying your tickets the day they go on sale and shooting for the earlier 11:00 a.m. time slot. The festival definitely gets more crowded as the day goes on!
Little Craft Fest Check-In Process & Prize Distribution
I opted to stay at a different hotel about 10 minutes away because it was a little bit cheaper than the Hyatt Regency Conroe rooms, even with the discounted room block for the festival. But I still made sure to arrive early and line up around 9:45 for our VIP entry at 10:00.
At check-in, VIP attendees got a purple wristband with spots for hole punches for each day of the festival, and timed-entry attendees got an orange wristband. The Little Craft Fest staff used these to determine who could enter the marketplace early.
At April’s event this year, there was a stamp rally where attendees could visit a different list of vendors each day (with a minimum number of purchases) and turn in their stamped event guides to receive a small prize from Little Craft Place. But at Spooky Little Craft Fest this October, they decided to forgo the stamp rally in favor of small prizes for every guest as we entered at check-in.
On Friday, everyone got to draw from a “Pumpkin Prize Pit” to randomly determine which item they would receive. I scored a pumpkin washi tape, and I was really happy with it! On Saturday, attendees got to trick-or-treat and choose one small item from a prize chest. I selected a cute pumpkin pen that I scoped out at the prize table the day before. On Sunday, attendees were encouraged to shop in costume, and winners of a costume contest received prizes in the afternoon.
I vastly preferred the simplicity of this system to the chaos of the stamp rally for a few reasons. I think it was less distracting for the vendors, who had to take the time to stamp hundreds of booklets for people who weren’t even necessarily shopping from their booths. It cut down on unnecessary crowding a little bit because there weren’t lines for the stamp rally on top of lines to view and shop the products. And to be totally honest, I wasn’t crazy about the requirement to purchase items from 8 of the 20 vendors on the stamp rally sheet last time, because I wanted to use the money I had budgeted to prioritize some of the other vendor booths instead. I especially enjoyed the prize chest format on Saturday where everyone could just quickly choose the item that they wanted and then start shopping! I really hope that the LCF team will continue to hand out prizes this way for future events.
After snapping on our wrist bands and selecting our entry prizes, VIP attendees received our gift bags. The Soolla pouches were so nice, and I loved the pink and purple color palette they chose! I’m really excited to use mine for journaling on the go.
The Marketplace
With my arms full of tote bags and my credit card preparing to be swiped, I made my way into the marketplace to track down some of my favorite vendors. Here are a handful of their adorable booths!
Honeycat Market
Chelsea from Honeycat Market just might be my all-time favorite source for hand-drawn stationery items. She uses special brushstroke settings in Procreate on her iPad to make her line work look like ink running from a fountain pen. She often draws cozy creatures or pretty trinkets, and I would honestly buy everything she creates if I could.
Chelsea also participated in a mini stamp rally with two other vendors, and offered her customers the chance to roll a 20-sided die to receive one of two different mini sticker sheets during Saturday’s trick-or-treating event! I was a repeat customer to her booth, for obvious reasons.
Veronica Porlier
I discovered Veronica Porlier’s artwork at the Little Craft Fest event back in April, and I instantly fell in love with how bright and colorful her designs are.
She also creates a lot of pieces with mixed media and then scans them into the computer to create stickers, which adds a really charming DIY quality to junk journal pages.
Jollie Ollie
Reannon from Jollie Ollie blew me away with her selection of bookish merch! If you’re a junk journaler who also loves to read, her products will be right up your alley.
Okeya Stationery Co
Kenzo & Audrey from Okeya Stationery Co were an absolute joyful delight. They were so friendly to everyone who visited their booth and to all of their neighboring vendors. Their booth setup was like a whimsical cottage shop from a fairytale, and they were dressed as Wirt and Greg from Over the Garden Wall! (I’m pretty sure I heard the soundtrack playing from a speaker while I browsed their merch, too!) I really enjoyed their art style and wished I could buy one of everything. I did make sure to pick up a hand drawn Over the Garden Wall sticker sheet as part of my stash from their booth!
Teddy House Art
Tiffany from Teddy House Art has created the cutest little universe of original characters!
Her artwork featuring the same cast of cozy woodland creatures in different settings with lovely pastel colors reminds me a lot of Sanrio.
Nessa K Design
Vanessa from Nessa K Design brought these adorable stationery tins that she sold in a bundle with a variety of her different products. I love my little tin and have been using it to house all of the small trinkets I brought home from the festival!
BLN Jewels
Speaking of trinkets, I can never resist an LCF bag charm to add to my purse from BLN Jewels!
Dalton Doodle
I specifically stopped at Dalton Doodle’s booth to find some merch for my husband Austin to enjoy since he was such a good tag along with me for Little Craft Fest (and lug my tote bags full of stationery purchases around). Dalton creates the coolest dinosaur artwork, and as a HUGE dino nerd and Jurassic Park superfan, Austin was loving it.
We found a gorgeous print to hang in his office, some vinyl stickers to share (some for my journal, some for his laptop), and one of my favorite products in the whole marketplace: dinosaur washi tapes divided up by different geologic periods. We brought home a Cretaceous Period tape and a Jurassic Period tape with some of our favorite dinos!
Scribble Prints Co
I’ve shopped from Andrea at Scribble Prints Co countless times when she and her team have been vendors at various local Dallas-area events. I really like their cohesive scrap pack kits that make it really easy to put together maximalist-style spreads in my junk journal.
KamiAri Studio
This vendor hand draws her own versions of Pokemon characters and turns them into cute merch. I have been so tempted for a while now to invest in one of her gorgeous embroidered hoodies covered in mini Pokemon – but I chose a budget-friendly tote bag instead!
She also offered so many adorable Halloween sticker sheets and washi tapes.
This barely scratches the surface of everything you can find in the marketplace at Little Craft Fest, and it’s such a fulfilling shopping experience to support small business owners standing right in front of you instead of huge faceless corporations. I have a hard time reigning in my budget because it’s so exciting to see so much human creativity in one place and so meaningful to help artists continue to follow their passion.
The Photo Booth
If you’re heading to the next upcoming Little Craft Fest event, one thing you definitely don’t want to miss is the photo booth! Each year there is an enormous balloon installation with marquee letters to use as a backdrop, and Digital Diaries offers professional photos that you can download to your phone AND print out for your journal. They have budget-friendly packages with 2 copies of your photo strip for $7 that you can easily share with a friend, and they also have a keychain station where you can pay a little bit extra to frame your photos in a plastic case and turn them into cute bag charms. I chose the package with extra copies of our photos for my junk journal and for cutie charms!
Here are some of the outstanding photos they took for us!
The Workshops
I don’t have a lot of helpful info to share about the workshops offered by the vendors and other local artists throughout the weekend, because they fell a little bit outside of my budget. But what I can tell you is that they looked like a LOT of fun.
There was a really nice variety of different types of classes: plenty of different junk journaling and scrapbooking options, but also things like royal icing cookie decorating, calligraphy, watercolor, and more. If I was attending with a group of friends, I think I would definitely sign up for one of the workshops together to make the most of our weekend. Since I was traveling with my husband Austin, I settled for doing some late night junk journaling at our hotel room desk while he cheered me on!
Final Thoughts on Spooky Little Craft Fest in Houston
I truly had the best time at Little Craft Fest this October! If you enjoy crafting, junk journaling, scrapbooking, or even just collecting cute stationery, I highly recommend checking it out for yourself. Everyone is so friendly and excited to be part of a community with shared hobbies, and there’s something about looking your favorite small business owners in the eye and supporting their dreams that feels really special.
My Weekend at Spooky Little Craft Fest in Houston
