Used cars have long been offered for sale. Ditto secondhand clothes, shoes, books and even housewares. But art supplies?
Avid crafter and thrifter Arianna Soloway read an article about secondhand arts and crafts supply stores a couple of years ago and thought, How do we not have one here? Burlington is full of artists and environmentally conscious people, she said last week. “It just seemed like the place for one.”
And now it is. Soloway opened the Makery on Pine Street on November 30. Fabric, quilting supplies, yarn, scrapbooking materials, beads, art kits and books are among many items tastefully displayed. The store, surrounded by art studios and located in the back of the building that houses Great Harvest Bread, is already attracting repeat customers.
Visiting for the third time in two weeks, Skunk Bouchard popped in just after the doors opened last Thursday and left with a handful of treasures, including six 2-inch-long tins with sliding lids. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with them,” the 36-year-old artist said, though turning them into tiny dioramas is one possibility. At 10 cents apiece, the tins were not a risky investment.
Most items sell for roughly half of what they’d cost new.
As excited as most people are to take home supplies — “You’re like a kid in a candy store!” Allison Belisle said to her mother, Sandy Belisle, who gushed over yarn — others are equally thrilled to drop theirs off. The Makery gives store credit for donations and accepts a wide array of items — school supplies, too. It asks that they be free of smells, moths or other pests.
“People in the yarn world joke that buying yarn and knitting are two separate hobbies.” Arianna Soloway
Kitty Daly dropped by to donate two boxes of books and yards upon yards of fabric. She is a dressmaker who has sewn professionally for 55 years. “I’m retired, and I just need to clean out,” she said. Her donation contained mostly wools and silks. Interfacings and linings may come next.
Minutes later, Alicia Terkel set on the Makery’s front counter a heavy box of fine yarns wound onto giant commercial spools. “I have even more,” she told Soloway, almost apologetically. “Remember when I said I could overwhelm you?”
Soloway was willing to be overwhelmed and went outside to help Terkel carry in four more boxes.
“Ah, that feels good,” Terkel said once it was all out of her car. Terkel is a sewing specialist at Fourbital Factory, an apparel manufacturing company a half mile away on Pine Street. Her donation was a combination of company and personal excess.
Soloway, 32, was a walking billboard for her store that day. She wore a multicolored cardigan that she knit with leftover yarn from her own projects.
The Atlanta native, a knitter since age 6, has worked as a props designer, theater administrator, real estate agent and home inspector. She and her husband, a New Hampshire-born University of Vermont grad, moved to Vermont from Chicago three and a half years ago, and Soloway managed Shelburne’s Must Love Yarn store for three years.
She hopes that low price points at her own new business will encourage people to try new crafts, and she is pleased to offer an outlet for items she considers too precious to be thrown away or stashed in an attic. Crafters tend to collect supplies, she said: “People in the yarn world joke that buying yarn and knitting are two separate hobbies.”
When Soloway researched secondhand craft supply stores to help shape her own store’s aesthetic, she found that they run the gamut. Some offer “all sorts of weird bits and bobs” at super-low prices, while others are upscale resale boutiques — “everything from Let’s make art out of trash to Let’s make sure art supplies don’t become trash,” she said.
The Makery is the latter, a curated space that invites browsing and sparks inspiration. Soloway will offer classes, starting with Mini Makers, a January 4 craft session for kids ages 2 to 5, followed by Bring Your Own Craft Night on January 9, an adult social that’s free to attend. She plans to teach knitting and crocheting and to invite other artists to teach.
After unloading all that yarn, Terkel browsed and bought a picture frame, two cards, three rubber stamps and three tiny wooden snowflakes. She dubbed her visit a success: “I’m taking out a lot less bulk than I brought in.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Hobby Hand-Me-Downs | Secondhand arts and crafts supply store the Makery opens in Burlington”
This article appears in The Reading Issue 2024.
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