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My son and I strolled into ArtScraps, a creative materials reuse-it shop on the corner of Pascal and St. Clair, ready to make someone else’s waste our own personal treasure.  ArtScraps collects leftovers, overstock, factory rejects, and a vast array of miscellaneous items normally destined for the landfill and gloriously turns them into art supplies.  If the “Ax Man” married Martha Stewart, ArtScraps would be their spunky love child.  By connecting environmental conservation with the creative process, ArtScraps has built one of the most unique stores in the Twin Cities.  Amongst the barrels and bins of supplies, we found a bucket filled with baby doll faces.  Murphy juggled a few of the plastic head pieces and smirked, “What the heck could we make out of these?”

“Something spooky,” I quipped. 

Murph giggled and said, “We should make somethin’ and scare mom.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhh…yeah,” I replied.

Welcome to ArtScraps, a place where anything is possible (even the supplies to scare the bejesus out of your spouse!).  In the Dr. Seuss spirit of creativity, a giggling slap-happy world filled with whirligigs and doohickeys and unfathomable creatures (Ever box a Gox in your sox?), the ArtsScraps store in St. Paul opens the gates of our imaginations and lets it run hog wild.  The place is packed with so many wacky art supplies it unhinges your brain, deconstructing what you previously believed was possible for an arts and crafts project. 

Next, my son plunged his hand into a massive barrel filled with metal bottle caps.  It was pure organic joy.

“This.  Is.  Sooooo….awesome,” Murphy said, as he twirled his hand around in the barrel.  Then we found fabric samples, day-glo orange prescription bottles, cookie tins, medical tubing, tongue depressors, stamps, stickers, feathers, tiles, corks, flags, tiny hockey sticks, and dinosaur stencils.   

By removing both the financial (you can fill a grocery bag and it’s only five bucks!) and physical (have we talked about the bucket of women’s shoulder pads?) limitations on the creative process, ArtScraps allows shoppers to come up with their own projects.  You don’t have to have your creative impulses reduced to a pre-determined store bought kit.  Plus, they are constantly taken donations from corporations. So the stock is always changing.

“We want people to come up with their own projects and explore the whole creative process,” Megan, the cheery ArtScraps clerk, told me.  “And we also want people to try and reuse things instead of just throwing them away.” 

As she spoke, Megan sorted through a box of donated glow-in-the-dark stickers.  The lime green tablets would retail for a lot of money just down the street at Creative Kid’s Stuff.  But at ArtScraps, I could afford several reams.  I grabbed a few so that Murph and I could cut them up and make our own space world for the ceiling in his room.  This is the very goal of ArtScraps:  reduce waste through the reuse of discarded material and make some art while you’re at it.

On our way out, I noticed a “Back to School” kit for sale that included glue sticks, paper clips, binders, crayons, etc.  But there were a few items in the pre-boxed kit that struck me:  tennis balls and marbles.

“Our interns put those ‘Back to School’ kits together,” Megan said, as she let out a short laugh.

“Oh, really,” I replied.

“Yeah,” Megan said, “Our interns were actually middle school kids.  They put those kits together for their peers knowing exactly what they would want.”

How cool is that?

What:  ArtScraps          651.689.2787  http://www.artstart.org/

Where:  1459 St. Clair             St. Paul 

Hours:  Monday-Friday 10-5 Saturday 10-4