Event Season is Upon Us!
It is finally that time of year! Our event season is upon us, and we’ve been cocooned all winter, preparing ourselves to host our workshops, events, and our Downtown Alley Flea Market. We’ve been tirelessly making improvements to our space in preparation to have more folks coming through and exploring our beloved little shop. After countless (literally) rearranges and reconfigurations, and painting, and planning, and more behind the scenes magic, we think we’re as ready as we can be, and we can’t wait to see y’all!
We have a solid mix of activities already planned from now until April and beyond, and we’re currently working on the calendar into the spring and early summer to add more activities and classes for us to do together.
Emily, from Blooming Wand hosted a full moon circle this week, and will be hosting another class next week about SoulCollage. She does host full moon circles regularly, virtually and in person. It's a lovely opportunity to be in an intentional space with others to have a full moon ritual ceremony, intention setting time, and be able to sit in reflection of your inner personal landscape. Next week on the 22nd, Emily will be hosting as Peggy Sue Snoey facilitates a SoulCollage class, an artistic exercise meant to encourage a deeper sense of self discovery through making a collage.
The foremost classes we have at Kindred are involving garden prep, or ways to help along your outdoor space before spring comes. We’re hosting a soil blocking workshop on the 26th of Feb, where we’ll teach you what soil blocking is, how to do it, and you’ll be able to make some of your own blocks for your seeds for your garden! We’ll also be hosting another vermicomposting (composting with worms) workshop on March 5, and Kelsey Allan will be returning to teach. Kelsey has a lot of experience and is rich in knowledge about all things nutrition, gardening, and sustainable practices. We’ll also be hosting a mason bee workshop in mid March, where you’ll get to make your very own bee house and we’ll send you along with some mason bee cocoons and teach you how to hatch them. Finally, in late March, we’ll be teaching a seed bomb workshop, we’re we’ll all make seed bombs together.
Outside of our workshop schedule, we also have a few events coming up that we are exceedingly excited about. After postponing in February due to safety concerns, we’ll happily be having our free First Friday event in March! The evening of March 4th, we’ll be hosting a mending group in Kinship Collective. Not only is it a great opportunity to see our collective space and all the work that’s gone into it, you can also learn some basic mending techniques for free! Whether it's a well loved pair of pants with a tear, a sock with a hole in the heel, or a shirt in need of a patch, we’ll be there with basic supplies and some helpful instructions to help you extend the life of your clothes, thereby reducing textile waste together.
The evening of March 4th, we’ll also be debuting our Kinship Collective Community Art Gallery, to which you can still contribute your self portrait in any medium. It’ll definitely be worth a stop to check out all the amazing self portraits folks have been bringing us to hang in the hallway leading into Kinship Collective.
It's still a ways out, but we wanted to announce it ASAP. The first weekend in April will be our clothing swap! You can begin bringing in your donations of clothing to the store from now until March 15th. While you don’t have to bring clothes to shop for clothes once the event comes around, we are asking for a $5-$10 donation to attend/leave clothes behind in order to cover the cost of any rentals we have like racks, hangers, etc. We also ask that you do not bring in clothes that are stained, ripped, you wouldn’t otherwise want to find at a thrift store. Also, no kiddo clothes. We are considering organizing a swap for kids clothes at some point, but this will be for grown ups. We’re taking all gender clothes, shoes, and accessories and would love to have y’all come shop for free! The event was a huge success last year, and we all walked away with some new-to-us fashions. We’re very excited to get to do it again and look forward to seein’ y’all there!
Out of everything we’re working to plan for y’all, we’re most excited to announce the arrival of Flea season! Our Downtown Alley Flea was a resounding success last year, and this year we’re coming back stronger, better, and wiser with more vendors and more opportunities to support our community altogether. With generous sponsorship from our friends at the VDA, the Downtown Alley Flea will be taking place every second Saturday from March to October in the parking lot just next to us. With anywhere from 20–30 vendors, makers, and fellow treasure hunters alike, we’ll be there with bells on ready to have a good time.
From the beginning, it’s been important for us to have the Flea made up of folks who offer things that are different from what you can find at the Vancouver Farmers Market, which is blocks away. A true flea market has a good mix of treasures to sift through, some new stuff, handmade stuff, and made up of folks who live with you in your own community. We’re happy to be able to host such an event, and after the last couple of years we’ve all had, every flea market feels like a big ol’ party. We love it, and we hope you will too.
Being able to do events like these–classes, flea markets, workshops, and free art projects are a big part of why we exist and why we do what we do at all. Kindred was always about being much more than just a retail space, but an extension of our collective values and an example of how a low waste lifestyle can be beautiful and attainable for all. Learning how to repair clothing, or finding an antique and giving it a new life, or being in community with other folks are all big parts of a life well lived. Being able to be a place that can host events that facilitate those things is us livin’ the dream. Thanks for making it possible by showing up. We’ll see you all soon!
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