Verve Creative Studio

10/16/2026

🎨🍷 Creative Night: Moonlit Pumpkin Patch Paint & Sip 🍷🎨
October 30th | 6-9 PM

October is almost over, so we're giving it one last appropriately moody send-off. 🌙🎃

Join us for an evening of watercolor, sipping, laughing, and making something with your hands instead of staring at another screen. This month we're painting a Moonlit Pumpkin Patch.

No experience required. No pressure to create a masterpiece. We'll guide you through the painting step by step while introducing a little perspective, shading, layering, and silhouette work along the way.

The best part? This is a judgment-free zone. Your pumpkins can be round. Crooked. Lumpy. Mysteriously shaped. They're pumpkins.

✨ Limited spots available, so grab yours.

If you stopped by Open Studio on First Friday, you already know but here's your reward for being one of the cool kids who read captions:

🎉 Use code FIRSTFRIDAYS for 50% OFF your Paint & Sip registration.

Valid through the end of the year on select Verve Creative Studio events.

Come paint something beautifully autumnal before we collectively pretend we're ready for winter.

Event 🔗 in the comments 👇

📍 Verve Creative Studio | 1220 3rd St SE Suite 400 in NewBo District
📅 October 30th
⏰ 6-9 PM

Tag your Paint + Sip partner. 👇

10/12/2026

🎬 The studio is spoken for.

We're closed to the public today and tomorrow while a private production takes over the space. Good things are happening behind the scenes, and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled creativity on Wednesday.

Thanks for rolling with it.

- W 🦋

10/07/2026

Waiting for permission? In this economy? Create the thing. Write the story. Build the world you’ve been looking for. 🦋✨

["If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” - Toni Morrison]

09/26/2026

We painted. We sipped. We turned a tree painting into eight completely different stories. 🍂🍁✨

Our happy little autumn trees sprouted birds, leaf piles, personality, and one deeply concerning squirrel named Tommy (don't ask questions and don't say his name 3 times). 🐿️

This is exactly why we keep paint & sips small. Not because we're trying to be exclusive. Because magic happens when there's room for conversation, accidental creativity, and stories that somehow start with watercolor trees and end with haunted woodland creatures. 😁

They're also not about painting perfectly. It's about slowing down, making something with your hands, sharing a drink, and leaving inspired.

Small group. Tiny canvas. A large table full of interesting humans. Exactly how we like it.

See you at the next one.

- W 🦋

09/24/2026

Some studios start with a lease and a Pinterest board.

We started with four years of planning, one hundred pages of business strategy, a healthy amount of stubborn optimism, and the audacity to believe creativity deserved better than another beige conference room.

The result?

A creative ecosystem in the heart of NewBo where ideas can think, play, experiment, collaborate, and occasionally stare dramatically into the distance before becoming something brilliant.

Inside the blog, we're sharing the full story behind Verve Creative Studio, from concept to construction, c*c wall to Chrysalis Pods, and all the beautiful chaos in between.

Spoiler alert: there was a lot more involved than choosing paint colors. 😉

While we're proudly independent and locally owned in Cedar Rapids, we've been fielding inquiries from across the Midwest, from Kansas and Missouri to Minnesota and beyond.

The SEO is definitely SEOing. 🤓

Turns out people have been searching for exactly this kind of creative space. And honestly? We're just getting started.

🔗 Read the full story link in the comments 👇

09/24/2026

Our first in-house merch drop since opening doors is here. Just a little love letter to the vision: The Creative Collective, Iowa Kind, and Verve. Three designs. Three stories. One dream.

For the dreamers, the makers, the community-builders, and the folks who know kindness is an action verb.

Limited-run embroidered caps. Available in-store only.

When they're gone... they gone. 🦋

See you at the studio. 🧢✨

09/11/2026

Somewhere along the way, "bohemian" got reduced to a Pinterest board.

Flowy dresses. Layered jewelry. Neutral palettes. A curated kind of unconventional.

But bohemianism didn't start as a look. It began as a movement. Artists. Writers. Musicians. Journalists. Creative minds choosing curiosity over convention and expression over expectation.

The funny thing about labels is that we create them to explain people, then use them to put people in boxes.

To me, being bohemian has nothing to do with what hangs in your closet and everything to do with how you move through the world.

✨ Living life on your terms. Following ideas that don't make sense to everyone else. Protecting your creativity. Making room for freedom. Trusting your own voice, even when it whispers instead of shouts.

Maybe you're an artist or a dreamer. Maybe you're building a life that doesn't fit neatly into someone else's definition of success.

Either way, there's probably a little bohemian spirit hiding in there.

You just have to stop asking permission and let it out.

W A N N E T T E 🦋

09/09/2026

🎨🍷 Last Friday Creative Night: Paint & Sip 🍷🎨
September 25 | 6-9 PM

You know that feeling when your brain has 37 tabs open, and it's about to crash? Yeah. Let's do something about that.

Join us for an evening of painting, sipping, laughing, and temporarily forgetting about your inbox. No experience required. No pressure to create a masterpiece. Just a few hours to unplug, make something with your hands, and hang out with humans instead of screens.

The best part? This is a judgement free zone. Just paint, good company, and the occasional "I actually kind of love what I made" moment.

✨ Limited spots available, so grab yours.

If you fluttered by open studio on First Friday, you already know what's up. 😎🏷️

And because we appreciate people who read captions...

🎉 Use code FIRSTFRIDAYS for 50% OFF your Paint & Sip registration.

Valid through the end of the year on select Verve Creative Studio events.

Come paint something beautiful. Or weird. Or beautifully weird. That's kind of our thing.

📍 Verve Creative Studio | 1220 3rd St SE Suite 400 in NewBo District

📅 September 25
⏰ 6-9 PM

Tag the friend who's overdue for a creative night out. 👇

Unplug and get creative at Verve's Last Friday Paint & Sip. Learn watercolor techniques, paint an autumn tree, and enjoy a relaxed evening of art.

09/07/2026

Whew. Let's free ourselves from the idea that branding starts and ends with a logo. 😌🪷

Because if your messaging changes every week, your content feels disconnected, and your audience can't tell what makes you different... the logo is not the problem.

Branding is the foundation. Marketing is the amplifier.

And no amplifier can fix a signal that isn't clear.

🦋 Read the latest on the blog for our take on small business branding, why "winging it" gets expensive, and what to do instead.

🔗 Link in the comments

04/24/2026

“Creative studio” is one of those terms that sounds self‑explanatory… until you actually try to explain it. At its core, it can mean a lot of different things, and we've been getting tons of questions.

We break down what it means here at Verve—what a creative studio is, what makes our approach different, and how the space we’re building supports small businesses, creators, and community builders across Eastern Iowa.

It’s not just a space—it’s an ecosystem. A place where brands stop feeling scattered and start making sense.

We put words to what we’re building in Cedar Rapids. Read it slow. Let it land.
👉 https://vervecreative.studio/what-is-a-creative-studio/

Curious what’s happening behind the scenes? Subscribe to our newsletter for a peek inside as the studio comes to life:
👉 http://eepurl.com/gQQxsf