Walking into Seattle Recreative
reuse center is like entering an arts and crafts wonderland.
Every nook and cranny is packed
with donated materials just waiting to be transformed.
The mission of Seattle ReCreative is to promote creativity, community
and environmental stewardship through creative reuse and arts education.
For eight years, crafters of all types have flocked to the store, drawn in
by the ever changing inventory, the low prices and the eco friendly vibe.
What we really want to do is help keep usable
materials out of the landfill and available for the community to use.
$5.24 is your total.
We do that by having our retail art thrift store here in Greenwood.
We also have a whole arts programing wing where we do after school arts,
we do camps and classes, all of those sorts of things
besides the traditional arts and crafts
supplies like yarn, fabric paint.
This is eight yards, the fabric, $3 a yard.
They offer nontraditional art supplies like mattress springs,
pill bottles and whatever this is.
We have a couple of programs for free supplies.
One is our free for black, indigenous or artists of color.
And then we also do that same type of program for public school teachers.
Where teachers can come in and shop certain materials for free once a month.
First Grade Teacher.
When York Jones uses the program to find supplies for class science projects.
These are going to be amazing legalities.
How many do you need? About 200.
The Free for Teachers program is really great.
It allows me to come in and get things for my classroom that,
you know, I would normally have to pay for myself.
So it's it's amazing.
Local artists come here searching for unusual supplies
and inspiration to bring their work to the next level.
A lot of my work is already like mixed media
and scrappy, so this is like really convenient for me.
I am making puppets.
I have a puppet studio in Georgetown.
I love how it's folded.
I know. Gives you an idea, doesn't it?
Frequent shoppers.
Wendy, James and Nicola Beason are mixed media artists
who are always on the hunt for just the right piece to finish a project.
This came from here.
This was a rubber stamp that some artists
made, you know, donated.
And then we find it and we're like,
Hey., I can put that in something.
I've been coming to Seattle ReCreative since at least 2017.
Mostly I look for odds and ends
and strange antiques or things from another time.
Just things that inspired me.
Visiting Nicola's art studio,
you can't help but be delighted to see where these odds and ends landed.
I picked these up at Seattle ReCreative last week.
A few different options for an assemblage piece
that I'm working on now, and I really thought it needed
some sort of beads or something to hang on these cool old hinges.
Everyone, in addition to coming in to shop here, should follow us
on Instagram or Facebook because we often will post the latest things
or very popular items or particularly interesting items.
Sometimes you might not find what you're looking for,
but you'll find something else.
So you'll always find something.
Yeah.
Donations keep things interesting.
You never know what might come through the door.
Today it's sewing machines.
So I'm just weighing the donations that just came in.
We weigh the donations Just because we track how much we divert
from the waste stream for an average month is about 4500 lbs. of materials.
That's 54,000 lbs. or 27 tons a year.
For those who are counting,
besides
benefiting the environment, creative reuse provides
people a unique opportunity to think about things differently.
I might have a cork, but I'm not using it to stop a bottle.
I'm using that cork for something else.
I think kids are really good at looking at a cork
and saying, Oh, it's a person, it's a rocket ship or whatever it is.
And I think adults are able to do that too.
They just need a little bit more encouragement.
One of the things that I love the most
is when a customer shopping, hears
another customer ask a question and then offers their own solution.
All these connections help again build community and allow people
to connect with each other about something they love too, right?
Making things.
We have great staff.
We have amazing volunteers.
Here, you want to see a great draw that a volunteer organized today.
We have built
something really awesome and I love that we keep the good stuff
out of the landfill too, you know, like I like that we do that piece as well.