Who Gives a SCRAP is a crafter’s dream. A hoarder’s reprieve. A Pinterest-lover’s paradise.
Whatever you want to call it, the newly opened eclectic scrap shop wants your stuff.
The small space on Drake Road and Shields Street is crammed with bits of yarn, stacks of old National Geographic magazines, piles of puzzle pieces, weathered woodblocks, wallpaper, mugs, bowling balls, embroidery thread, crayons, keys and locks — we could go on and on.
The Fort Collins location joins two in Colorado Springs, all started by co-owners Jayne Blewitt and Lorrie Myers. The duo was inspired to spread the message of upcycling — revamping unwanted stuff to make something new — after Myers’ niece showed her a store that looked like “a Michael’s and a hardware store on steroids.”
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Myers, a former school secretary and habitual collector, called Blewitt, an artist with an overflowing craft closet, and they got to work. They started taking donations in July and opened their first Colorado Springs location in November. Since then, their stores have diverted more than 13 tons of materials from landfills.
“If you don’t want it, there’s somebody else who probably does,” said Blewitt during an interview in the back room of the new Fort Collins store. “We want to be the recipient of things people just don’t know what to do with.”
There’s an obvious environmental motive behind the operation. Myers said the Colorado Springs stores together toss a mere 6 pounds of trash every three weeks, and employees weigh donations and purchases to pinpoint how much they’re keeping out of the garbage.
But the co-owners have a more intimate connection with the concept, too. Both women have lost loved ones who were “pack rats,” so they know how it feels to watch a once-beloved collection be disassembled.
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“We really care for your things, and we know it’s hard to part with them,” Myers said. “We want them to be reused and not just thrown in a bin and dug around by sticky fingers.”
The women, joined by Blewitt’s daughter and Fort Collins store manager Carly, have a story for everything in the shop. They remember the decorator who left boxes of old wallpaper scraps on her doorstep for pickup. And the artist who bought the wallpaper to line the inside of cigar boxes.
Myers even used the stores to part ways with some of her extensive handbag collection. She remembers one purse in particular: a red one with a bakelite handle.
“Every time someone picked it up in the store, I went (gasps) and finally the loveliest woman bought it as a surprise for her mom.”
Myers, a self-proclaimed hoarder described the experience as “freeing.”
“After a while, it just becomes, how much stuff can we really have in our lives?” she said. “It weighs you down.”