Is This Craft Night the Hottest Party in Alameda?
The Bay Area’s full of subcultures and meetups for just about everyone. So as part of a new series from KQED Arts & Culture called “Finding Your People,” Arts and Culture Editor Nastia Voynovskaya takes us inside a craft night in Alameda that’s quickly become one of the hottest events in town.
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Episode transcript
This transcript is computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevara and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted. During the pandemic, KQED arts and culture editor, Nastia Voynovskaya had a little bit of a wake up call. A lot of you can probably relate to this, but Nastia says that after lockdown, her social circle totally shrank. She had her close friends, but was missing this sense of belonging to a wider community.
Nastia Voynovskaya: And then not only that, but I became so consumed with my work. It was hard not to working in news when there was so much bad news happening at that time and I was just spending a lot of time doom scrolling and it just contributed to this overall sense of pessimism about the world.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So in 2023, once it was safer to get out there, Nastya made a concerted effort to find her people. She joined a queer surf group and a DJ class for women and non-binary people. And it’s these hobbies that got Nastya thinking about the Bay Area subcultures that are getting people offline and out into the real world.
Nastia Voynovskaya: I started thinking about hobbies in a deeper sense about how through our passions we can connect with other people through really profound ways and that restored my faith in humanity and I know it’s doing the same for others so I really wanted to uplift the other folks creating spaces like that in the Bay.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So as part of a new series from KQED’s Arts and Culture Desk called Finding Your People, Nastia and the team are celebrating the meetups and subcultures that are bringing the Bay Area together in our increasingly online world. And today Nastia is taking us inside a craft night in Alameda that just might be the hottest club in town. And so for this series, you went to a craft night in Alameda. How did you hear about it?
Nastia Voynovskaya: I found it on social media, so Jenny Baquing, the founder, she has an account called Jenny and Cabbage where she posts all her events.
Jenny Baquing: Hi Bay Area friends! I’m hosting a free craft night in Alameda and you’re invited. We’re making stickers!
Nastia Voynovskaya: It’s named after Jenny and her dog, Cabbage, who is a fluffy brown poodle. And she had a video of a crochet and knitting meetup that she threw at a coffee shop that’s open late. And it was like 9, 10 p.m. Over a hundred young women were there, not at the club, but at the coffee shop knitting and hanging out. And I just thought that was so cool.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And tell me a little bit more about Jenny, and who is she, where is she from, and what is her vibe?
Nastia Voynovskaya: Jenny is a 38-year-old photographer that grew up in the Bay Area.
Jenny Baquing: Okay, so I was born in Oakland and I grew up in Antioch and I was raised in the East Bay and I lived here until I went to college.
Nastia Voynovskaya: She had lived in a few other cities before coming back to the Bay a couple of years ago and just realized she needed to make friends herself. That was where this whole endeavor started.
Jenny Baquing: I was in a transition period of my life and I do have like good friends who are in the Bay Area but they weren’t like they didn’t have the same like creative like hobbies as me so I was like okay like I think that I could start hosting creative…
Nastia Voynovskaya: And she describes herself as queer and neurodivergent. She said that growing up, she often struggled to socialize. So crafting is just a convenient icebreaker, but the real purpose of Jenny and Cabbage Craft Nights is just for folks to make friends.
Jenny Baquing: I hosted my first creative event last June and it was rock painting and 75 people came.
Nastia Voynovskaya: And it was really exciting and that definitely showed in the kinds of people I met that showed up a lot of the folks were shyer more introverted some of them identify as neurodivergent like her and an activity like making stickers or purse charms or painting rocks or drawing a pet portrait is really just a reason to spark up conversation
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: For people who aren’t super familiar with craft nights, is everyone working on one craft, or are you showing up with your own idea for a craft and just doing it around other people?
Nastia Voynovskaya: Jenny posts what the theme of each night is on her social media, and all people have to do is show up. There is no RSVP, she provides all the supplies, and you can come by yourself and there are collective tables where everyone is just working on the activity, sharing tips, and just chatting about life.
Jenny Baquing: Hi, are you guys here for craft day? Oh my gosh, you are the first ones here. So the line starts right up there and you’ll…
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Let’s talk about the vibes a little bit, because you actually went to a craft night. Can you paint the picture for me? I mean, were you doing crafts yourself?
Nastia Voynovskaya: I showed up on sticker making night and so she had purchased sticker designs from an independent artist on Etsy that people could color in. So it was honestly like going to the club. Like it was, it was a Thursday night. There was a line outside of like 50 people. Jenny was going up and down the line, personally greeting everybody.
Jenny Baquing: Oh, hi! Oh my gosh! Yay, so good to see you!
Nastia Voynovskaya: It was in the warehouse space of Alameda Brewing, so where they actually make all the beer. So it’s this big cavernous brick warehouse and it was just filled with the laughter and chatter of people of all different ages hanging out and making these crafts.
Tamia Manning: Okay, if you have any questions, I’ll be here.
Nastia Voynovskaya: So one of the folks I talked to is Natalie Vega, and she is a 30-year-old that works from home for a tech company. She mentioned that she felt really isolated with her remote job.
Natalie Vega: Any social time, I would really have to be intentional about it, but I also wasn’t really getting an opportunity to meet new people, and it just took me a long time to work up the courage to come.
Nastia Voynovskaya: She psyched herself up to attend one of these craft nights for the first time.
Natalie Vega: I was a little nervous at first, but very quickly that went away.
Nastia Voynovskaya: But she ended up making a bunch of friends, so it was just super sweet.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I like also resonate with that feeling of just like having to hype yourself up a little bit before like walking into a new thing, but it sounds like she has no regrets.
Nastia Voynovskaya: No, yeah, she said that she’s been coming back over and over and now she and Jenny are good friends, which was the whole goal of this night.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We’ll have more with KQED’s Nastia Voynovskaya right after this break. By the way, if you like the local deep dives that we bring you here on The Bay, consider becoming a sustaining KQED member. That is one of the most direct ways that you can help our show keep doing what we’re doing. Join the thousands of KQED members who make shows like The Bay possible. Just go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. We’ll be right back.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And it also seems like, I mean, you’re talking about a line outside the door, a massive warehouse of people crafting together. It seems like a lot of work to put something like this together. Like, how is Jenny doing that? Is she doing it by herself?
Nastia Voynovskaya: No, it is a team effort. She has a whole team of volunteers and the volunteers all started out as attendees and they just really believe in this mission and this vision because it’s a free event. There’s no intent to profit from it. It’s all just for the love of making new friends. Jenny’s husband, Chris O’Brien, described himself as her roadie. He fills out the spreadsheets and he kind of frees her up so she can focus on the creativity in the activities. One of the other volunteers I talked to, Tamia Manning, she was helping check folks in at the door.
Tamia Manning: I’m from Chicago and so I came very far away. And I came here knowing only two people…
Nastia Voynovskaya: She told me that she’s kind of been a lifelong student. So she told me she was a bit out of practice making friends outside the campus setting. Going to Jenny and Cabbage was one way for her to do that.
Tamia Manning: Honestly it’s a process of relearning what my hobbies are, what my passions are, and I honestly connect with at least one person every single time that I volunteer.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, we did an episode with our previous producer, Jessica Kariisa on just making friends in the Bay Area, and so much of that episode is about picking a hobby and then showing up consistently. When you were trying to find a community, were there any Bay Area-specific challenges that you found to that, or also maybe Bay Area specific opportunities?
Nastia Voynovskaya: I think when it comes to starting out with a new hobby, you really do have to be okay with embracing the discomfort and maybe give yourself a pep talk. First of all, you may not be good at the thing right away and you have to kind of work past that friction and just tell yourself it’s okay if you’re not perfect at whatever it may be. Another thing is definitely traffic and commuting. For my hobby, surfing, I live in Oakland, so I have to get all the way out to the Pacifica to make it happen. So you do really have to prioritize the time to do it. Also just knowing that you may not become besties with the people right away, but you do have to make an effort to show up. I do know that it is scientifically proven that to make new friends, you have to have repeated spontaneous and positive exposure to the people. So you really have to put yourself in the setting where you can run into people over and over and then over time, you know, some of them might become friends.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So Nastia, it sounds like you found a bunch of different hobbies. How have they improved your life?
Nastia Voynovskaya: I just feel so much more well-rounded as a person being part of these different communities and it’s also just been so rewarding to cultivate relationships that I didn’t expect. When you go out and do a hobby and you spontaneously connect with people, it might lead you to more new experiences that then kind of leave me with this sense that life is actually so vast, so interesting, so full of possibilities. So I think overall it’s just been a huge improvement to my life and my mental health.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Nastia, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us, I appreciate it.
Nastia Voynovskaya: Thank you so much for having me, Ericka, and I hope everyone gets out there and joins some new hobbies.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Nastia Voynovskaya, an Arts & Culture editor for KQED. This conversation with Nastia was cut down and edited by producer Gabriela Glueck. Alan Montecillo is our senior editor. He scored this episode and added all the tape, music courtesy of Audio Network and APM Music. The Bay is made every week by me and…
Alan Montecillo: Alan Montecillo
Gabriela Glueck: Gabriela Glueck
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: With support from Jen Chien, Katie Springer, Maha Sanad, Ethan Toven-Lindsey.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: If you want to get in touch with us here at The Bay, feel free to send us an email. We’re at thebay.kqed.org, and we always love hearing from you. Support for The Bay is provided in part by the Osher Production Fund. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. And I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks so much for listening to The Bay. Talk to you next week.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.