Our Story

I grew up in a family that was always making something.

My grandma and my Aunt Mary were big crafters, and they were always making things and sharing them with us kids. My mom was a florist, and my dad was basically the original “we have that at home” meme. Except we really would go home and make it ourselves, and a lot of the time we’d make it better.

There were a lot of kids in our family and not a lot of extra money, so making things ourselves was just what we did. If we wanted something, the first question usually wasn’t “where can we buy it?” It was “how can we make it?”

I think that had a lot to do with how my brain works now. I like figuring out how things are made, what materials I need, and how I can make something work with what I have. It turns out that’s a pretty useful skill when your job is designing craft kits!

Years later, my husband and I started going to estate sales and garage sales together. It was just something we really liked doing. We could spend an entire Saturday driving around, digging through old houses and garages, and seeing what we could find. Mostly, it was just a fun way for us to spend the day together.

Of course, we started bringing things home.

We were going so often that eventually we figured we might as well start selling some of our finds. That became the beginning of Auntie Kitsch back in 2019.

The more sales we went to, the more I was drawn to the handmade things. By the last day of a sale, most of the things people considered “valuable” would be gone, but there would still be ornaments, decorations, old craft supplies, and handmade treasures left behind. Those were the things I wanted. It brought me so much joy to find something that someone had poured so much time and effort into, and then try to figure out how they made it.

After years of digging through estate sales, old craft supplies, and other people’s collections, I learned a lot about what to look for. Combined with growing up in a family of crafters and junk collectors, it really helped shape my own style and the kinds of things I love today.

For a while, Auntie Kitsch was mostly our eBay shop, filled with the vintage treasures we found. We still have it today! But I wanted us to have something we actually made ourselves.

One of the old handmade pieces we had found was a little felt Christmas tree. I found it deep in a closet on the third day of an estate sale. It had been there all weekend, passed over by everyone else.

That little tree was Grandma Nelson.

And that is really what Auntie Kitsch has grown into. We still love hunting for old treasures, but now we get to take the handmade things we love, figure out how they were made, and turn them into kits or videos so people can make them again and they don’t get forgotten.