If you want to get crafty but don’t have a big supply budget or a lot of experience, the Magpie Creative Reuse Collective might be the place for you. The nonprofit specializes in pairing education with redistributing all kinds of materials.
“We teach classes that take the material we have available and in the class, people learn one way of upcycling or downcycling. We also teach repair, and we want to do more of that in the future,” Magpie Director of Education Keli Campbell says.
Everything from pipe cleaner flowers and old t-shirt headbands to visible mending has been on its recent class list. For some classes, they’ll hire local artists to teach, and some Campbell and others teach themselves. Anything’s fair game for a project, even old microscope slides.
“We named it Magpie because,