United States Top Crafting Cities Report
By: Team LibertyA survey of over 45,000 people by Statista found that DIY arts and crafts were the hobbies of choice for over 26% of respondents. This should come as no surprise when you consider how hands-on crafting can be; a feast for the senses compared to the sterile and flat digital world we live in now.
Instead, crafting is a hands-on experience. You get to feel the texture and flow of beautiful fabrics in your hands and run the exquisite printed designs between your fingers before choosing what is going to be part of your next project. If you are making a dress you can also choose from a range of dressmaking patterns.
Crafting has always been a popular pastime in this country. It teaches new skills, and you can discover how to create unique and personal items that simply can’t be found anywhere else. You also get the benefit of learning how to repair clothing and other items instead of throwing them away, which saves you money too.
It can sometimes be hard knowing where to start, and stores like Liberty London offer a wide variety of fabric choices which can be overwhelming. If you’re new to crafts like dressmaking, we can help in a variety of ways. See our list of helpful resources at the end of this article. With a hobby that can be both rewarding, relaxing, and really let you stretch your creativity, it’s no wonder crafting has become so popular!
We undertook a research project to explore crafting hobbies throughout the United States and Territories, including what people are searching for, what they make, and how they buy their supplies. We wanted to see exactly how popular different types of crafting have become. Discover our detailed results below. We were surprised by some of what we found - maybe you will be too.
What we found
The Covid-19 pandemic left us all with a lot of time on our hands. It’s no surprise that many hobbies became more popular almost overnight.
Broad Google Trends data for ‘sewing’ saw a spike in April 2020 as lockdowns began and we all had more time on our hands. A longer-term trend we saw was the increasing popularity of crochet. Knitting has traditionally been the more popular than crochet, but since 2010 crocheting has taken the lead in the US. We saw the same trends in the UK, but there, knitting reigned supreme until just last year. As you would expect, search interest for both types of crafts was highly seasonal with interests peaking in the colder months.
For a more detailed investigation, we examined 76 different data points for the top 100 cities in the US. This included search data, local crafting resources, and social media interest. After reviewing all the data we ended up with a final rank for each city. When we looked closer at the data, we discovered a lot more. You might have expected Portland, Oregon to be a popular place for crafting, but it turned out to be the most popular city for both fabrics and knitting. We didn’t expect to see Phoenix, Arizona become king of TikTok crafting, and poor Enterprise, Nevada, struggled across the board. Discover the most popular crafting cities, crafts, and some surprising facts you never knew.
For more information on how we put this list together, we’ve supplied a detailed methodology at the end.
Result
Crafting Cities
We scored the top crafting cities in the country by totaling their individual scores for each data point.
San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, California easily soared to the top of the charts in our 2023 roundup of best crafting cities in America. The Golden City beat off competition from bigger cities across the US because of its lively crafting scene and range of interests. While San Francisco scored well in all areas, in the end, its first-place ranking came down to the density of searches and creative outlets among its relatively small population compared to other metropolitan areas, proving that bigger doesn’t always mean better.
Enterprise, NV
With hindsight, perhaps the city of Enterprise, Nevada was poorly named. The city is the least crafty on our 2023 list. Its smaller population and area isn’t the problem as we accounted for this to make our results as fair as possible. What lets this city down was its lack of social media interest combined with poor results in education and key resources like knitting shops.
New York City, NY
It should come as no surprise that the nation’s biggest city is also one of the craftiest. The Big Apple scored well across the board. We weighted our results by population and area, so although New York City lost a few points due to the number of people living there, its smaller footprint compared to sprawling metropolitan areas like Houston, Texas, or Los Angeles, California, tipped it back into the running.
Top Crafting States
To find the top crafting States we added up the scores of each city within that state. As our overall scores are adjusted for each one million population, the disparity in sizes among the different States won’t affect the overall result.
| No. | States/Territories | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | Puerto Rico |
| 2 | New York | Hawaii |
| 3 | Illinois | Alaska |
| 4 | New Jersey | Kansas |
| 5 | Texas | Kentucky |
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California
With San Francisco already taking the spot for America's top crafting city it's no surprise to see California take the prize here too. In fact, we found the top three states perfectly reflect the top three cities.
Most popular craft activities in the US
We pulled this data from Google searches to identify which are the most popular crafting activities in each city on our list.
| Craft | City | State/Territory | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crochet | Minneapolis | Enterprise | Minnesota | Nevada |
| Sewing | Atlanta | Enterprise | Georgia | Nevada |
| Knitting | Portland | Enterprise | Oregon | Nevada |
| Pottery | Seattle | Enterprise | Washington | Nevada |
| Fabrics | Portland | Enterprise | Oregon | Nevada |
| Art | Fremont | Enterprise | California | Nevada |
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Most Social Cities
With social media now dominating how we communicate and learn, it made sense for us to investigate how crafting is taking advantage of this platform. We combined crafting hashtags from Instagram and TikTok to rank our cities.
Our top five results are all major cities in the US. We thought the most notable thing about these results was where they are, 4 of the top 5 cities are in the south or south-west. We would have expected crafts like knitting and crochet, which naturally lend themselves to cooler climates, would have shifted the results north but this was not the case.
| No. | City | State/Territory | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Phoenix | Enterprise | Arizona | Nevada |
| 2 | Pittsburgh | North Las Vegas | Pennsylvania | Nevada |
| 3 | San Diego | Winston-Salem | California | North Carolina |
| 4 | Chicago | St. Louis | Illinois | Missouri |
| 5 | Portland | St. Paul | Oregon | Minnesota |
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Top city for social activity
For this, we combined crafting and city hashtags from the social platforms Instagram and Tik Tok. The sunny city of Phoenix, Arizona absolutely dominated the results we got from TikTok, with over half a million crafting hashtags on the popular video app. Phoenix sits in position 41 in our overall ranking, but it is the clear winner here.
Most retail opportunities
Online shopping is a fact of life today, but some goods lend themselves more readily to in-person shopping. When you are starting a new craft project, getting to see and feel the materials you will be working with is ideal. You can always order online if you want to use the same materials in another project.
For this section, we searched map and business directory data to identify which cities had the most stores per square mile.
| No. | City | State/Territory | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | San Francisco | Enterprise | California | Nevada |
| 2 | Santa Ana | Tampa | California | Florida |
| 3 | Chicago | Scottsdale | Illinois | Arizona |
| 4 | Newark | San Juan | New Jersey | Puerto Rico |
| 5 | Jersey City | Honolulu | New Jersey | Hawaii |
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Thriftiest cities
Thrift and charity stores can be a wonderful source of inspiration and sometimes an amazing place to find clothing and fabrics which can be reused in a new project. Accumulated stock can provide an eclectic mix of patterns and designs which you can use to bring your next creation to life.
The big metropolitan centers again dominate this category because bigger populations will cycle through clothing more quickly than smaller cities, so more stores will naturally follow.
The little city of Enterprise, Nevada sits in last place here. This poor showing was a big factor in their position as America’s least-craftiest city.
| No. | City | State/Territory | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | San Francisco | Enterprise | California | Nevada |
| 2 | Seattle | Laredo | Washington | Texas |
| 3 | New York City | Memphis | New York | Tennessee |
| 4 | Orlando | San Juan | Florida | Puerto Rico |
| 5 | Miami | North Las Vegas | Florida | Nevada |
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Crafting Education
Crafting is a popular hobby for millions of Americans, but some are fortunate enough to benefit from a formal education. Unsurprisingly, we found that university-level arts courses in fields like design, crafting, and fabrics are limited to the nation’s bigger cities.
| No. | City | State/Territory | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York City | Enterprise | New York | Nevada |
| 2 | Los Angeles | Laredo | California | Texas |
| 3 | Chicago | Chesapeake | Illinois | Virginia |
| 4 | San Francisco | Wichita | California | Kansas |
| 5 | Dallas | Toledo | Texas | Ohio |
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Summary
Crafting remains an extremely popular hobby and pastime across the country. Our survey and analysis only touched on some of the more popular crafting activities, but the potential to learn, discover new fabric, or develop your existing skills, has never been greater. There is a wide range of shops and social support in most of the big cities so you will never be far from your next great discovery.
If crafting, particularly dressmaking, is new to you then you will be delighted to learn that Liberty London is starting a new series on crafting, and you can find the first article on how to cut a pattern here. Our range of Tana Lawn Cotton is perfect for making your first dress.
To assemble our article, we had to be careful to only look at relevant data. We began by limiting our core list of cities to the top 100 by population across the United States and territories.
Next, we investigated internet search data with help from Google. We used this to identify general crafting topics and interests. Related data was combined to build a more comprehensive picture across the US. For example, we considered ‘sewing classes’ and ‘how to sew’ the same thing and grouped them accordingly.
Back in the real world, we needed to know what physical stores served each of these communities. For this data, we turned to Yelp and extracted business information based on their search data and internal tagging. In some cases, we had to limit the search radius where two metropolitan areas were close enough to each other that they would affect each other’s results.
For the social element of the research, we decided to limit our investigation to only Instagram and TikTok. Both have huge followings and vibrant crafting communities which we felt were representative enough of our needs.
Finally, we pulled additional data in the form of Craft Council membership and fashion programs, which we considered a strong indicator of crafting interest, even though this may have led to a professional career rather than a lifetime hobby.
Altogether, we ended up with 76 unique data points for each city on our list. This was ranked and weighted according to the local population and geographical area to ensure we could fairly compare different cities on an equal basis. Without this, big cities like LA or NYC would dominate all the rankings simply because they are home to millions of people.
Believe it or not, one unexpected risk to our data turned out to be video games. Just as in real life, virtual crafting has become a popular element of modern video games, and so it’s possible this could have polluted some of our data. We think that, if this is the case, it is most likely to be reflected in the social data, rather than brick-and-mortar stores, or internet searches for knitting.