As I type this post, I’m looking at a small package filled with about $40 worth of art supplies left over from the scrapbooking binge era circa 2003 to 2006. Which I scored not long ago for $3 at a local thrift store.
There are expensive, well-made plastic circle templates spun on tiny ball-bearings. Pewter and bronze ‘affirmation’ tags with self-stick adhesive (how I can tell the date). White shell discs. Blank metal stamping tags. Specialty theme paper cutouts. The main stars of this trove are the soft plastic and silicone stamping plates: vector-drawn florishes and embellishments, geometric and floral medallions, label tags, etc.
I’ve worked behind the scenes in enough resale stores to know these objects may or may not have been donated together. Whatever original ‘story’ they told, may not have survived sorting and bagging in the back room. If they came in together, they could have been given up due to a move, homelessness, divorce, or death…or just boredom.
Demographically-speaking, they probably came from a woman owner dabbling in scrapbooking (or given as gifts to her). The items seem largely pristine, barely used or not at all.
I bought the package because I know the stamping plates will be useful in my fiber art and painting. This is the main reason why I scrounge interesting objects and supplies at low-cost outlets: not so much my innate covetousness, but the possibility of using these things in my art.
Some of this stuff I scored 30 years ago, always with an eye toward future use. Out of around 350 book arts and painting projects I’ve created since 1997, at least 225 have used items from my ‘hoard’. So those items have been paid for, by the sales of those books and paintings. To non-creative, uncluttering gurus, I have to explain that I have very little emotional attachment to my art supplies…they have value only from what I can make from them. They are capital investments.
I hate buying them at full price, and avoid that whenever I can. (Even though I know that full price sales help support the original designers and design companies.) I like that a whole new creative sub-industry has sprung up around the ‘re-use and recycle’ movement. As with the Gluten-Free movement, it makes my life easier.
I do have moments of sober self-reflection, when musing about the objects I find in thrift stores. There are lots of broken dreams and ended lives catalogued in those bits of detritus. I’m in the latter half of my life, so there’s a good chance that *my* hoard will end up the same way.
I can only hope that my cast-off toys and treasures will inspire another person’s creativity.