With Joann fabrics closing, these thrift stores are building a new crafting economy

[ResidentialBusiness]

“This is for the crafty girls who want to save money,” goes the voiceover on a recent TikTok, panning over the cheerful purple-and-gray exterior of Savannah’s Starlandia Art Supply and its shelves stocked with art supplies. “You need to be going to creative reuse stores, which are like thrift stores, but for crafts.” Another TikTok keeps it even simpler, with the text “pov: you find out thrift stores for arts & crafts exist,” overlaid on a montage of the treasures available at Seattle Recreative—paint brushes, markers, a whole wall of yarn. 

In fact, there are dozens of these “creative reuse centers” spread out across the country, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Atlanta, Georgia. Some centers have been operating for decades; others have sprung up since the pandemic, amid renewed enthusiasm for crafty hobbies. They sell everything from crayons to stamps to beads to fabric, and their mission is explicitly tied to sustainability. Organizers say they’re getting more and more emails and calls from people interested in establishing their own local spot. And yes, the young people on TikTok—who love crafting—are very enthusiastic about the idea. It’s likely that interest will only grow with news that the fabric store Joann—a decades-old stalwart for sewers, knitters, and other crafters—is closing all its remaining stores.

“My feeling is every municipality should have one of these,” says Barbara Korein of Retake/Remake in Peekskill, New York. 

[Photo: courtesy of the author]

Retake/Remake is a bustling little spot tucked into a converted turn-of-the-century hat factory in northern Westchester County—and it’s my local creative reuse center, a regular stop on my Saturday morning rounds and my go-to for everything from old National Geographic maps for Girl Scout projects to cross-stitch materials to slightly patchouli-scented wrapping paper. Retake/Remake accepts donations on the first Tuesday of every month and typically gets around 1,000 pounds of materials, says Korein. “We’ve converted about 113,000 pounds of waste from the waste stream.” The items are affordably priced when they put them out on the shelves, too: I once bought several skeins of hand-dyed yarn, a merino wool and alpaca blend, for $10 each, with an original sticker price of $32; I’ve bought needlepoint canvases, which are famously pricy, for as low as $1.

[Photo: courtesy of the author]

The concept is an elegant solution to a longstanding problem: Generally, traditional thrift stores don’t know what to do with half-used art supplies. “It’s an easy thing to identify and it’s a hard thing to donate,” says Korein. Often, they go straight into the trash and eventually the landfill. 

But there’s demand for that half-empty box of crayons—teachers, for instance, who often spend their own money on classroom supplies. Many creative reuse centers have special programs to serve this group: Austin Creative Reuse, for instance, has a Materials Mobile, which brings a truck full of no-cost supplies straight to educators. 

Creative small businesses often turn to these stores, for instance, and artists are a core constituency: “If you have $20 left for your art supplies, and you go to a traditional art center and buy a $20 tube of yellow paint, then whatever you’re painting is going to be yellow, and also it’s going to be paint,” says Jenn Evans of Austin Creative Reuse. But at a creative reuse center, that same $20 might buy a variety of paints and materials—and broaden artistic horizons. “It allows the artist to create artwork from their brains and their heart and not just have it limited by the materials that they can afford.” 

[Photo: Austin Creative Reuse]

“We’ve seen all people from all walks of life come in,” says Ulisa Blakely, Director of Programs and Development at The Wasteshed in Chicago. “But the patterns we typically see are students, teachers, artists whether they’re emerging or established, and also a lot of BIPOC people, which is awesome.” 

[Photo: Austin Creative Reuse]

The basic idea has been around for decades: The country’s first creative reuse center, San Francisco’s SCRAP, was opened in 1976 by Anne Marie Theilen and artist Ruth Asawa. SCRAP grew out of a program by the San Francisco Arts Commission to bring working artists into schools, but money for supplies was scarce. Two years later, New York City’s Materials for the Arts was founded by Angela Fremont, an artist working at the Department of Cultural Affairs; it’s now a 35,000-square-foot behemoth (though shoppable by appointment only) supported by the City of New York. 

[Photo: Anthony Sertel Dean/courtesy Materials for The Arts]

The idea percolated around the country over the years that followed, often in association with other reuse organizations. But it seems there’s been a jump in the last decade, and it’s accelerating. Each center serves as a catalyst for the next one—Korein, for instance, volunteered at Materials for the Arts for a decade and served on their board. “The more centers there are, the more people become aware of this idea,” says Evans. And it turns out to be a pretty seductive idea. 

[Photo: Anthony Sertel Dean/courtesy Materials for The Arts]

New technologies are making it possible for word to spread faster, too, and TikTok in particular can translate directly to increased business. Kimberly Maruska, Executive Director of SCRAP Creative Reuse (which is unrelated to the San Francisco original and has four locations across the country), says that after a popular TikTok featured their Ann Arbor outpost, they saw a huge jump in sales and new customers who cited the Tiktok.

“Those people are still coming in,” says Maruska. “They didn’t stop.”

Part of the appeal of creative reuse centers is their sheer practicality—why trash perfectly good materials, when teachers and artists are both famously cash-strapped? They’re handy for businesses with leftover materials, or individuals who want somewhere to take emotionally complicated donations—people who don’t knit, for example, want their beloved great aunt’s yarn stash to go to somebody who’ll appreciate it. 

[Photo: Anna Droddy/courtesy Materials for The Arts]

“In general, being creative is getting very expensive,” says Evans. Creative reuse centers are a way to try something new without a huge financial commitment, and even seasoned crafters are keen for more affordable options. 

But there’s a broader, less concrete appeal, too. “It’s an easy way to get involved in grassroots causes,” says Blakely. It’s an approachable step into a more sustainable life, and that’s by design. “We attract people to the idea of creative reuse by offering them low-cost art and craft and school supplies,” says Evans. “But then once they come to us, we want to open a conversation with them about the environmental aspects of what they’re doing and celebrate the fact that they’re shopping secondhand.” In an era of fast fashion and haul videos, creative reuse centers offer a particularly charming glimpse at another path. 

Creative reuse centers serve as community hubs, too. Centers generally offer programming beyond the materials. The Wasteshed and Austin Creative Reuse have both hosted trash fashion shows, for example, where competitors have to use provided materials in a kind of creative reuse-themed Project Runway. “We create communities around us,” says Maruska. “We’re taking in donations from local community members, businesses, we’re having educational programming, we’re partnering with other local nonprofits or libraries or schools.” 

Most of these centers are nonprofits; there’s little chance of a financial jackpot, and it’s a mission-driven labor of love that tends to attract passionate people. “It really feels good to be part of something that everybody seems to benefit from,” says Korein. 

All those aspects combine to create the quality I personally love best about Retake/Remake, which is that it allows me to imagine art as a practice for its own sake. I don’t have to produce anything gallery-worthy; I don’t have to justify it as a potential side-hustle. It doesn’t even have to be particularly good. It can just be for me—art as part of a straightforward human impulse to create. 

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