A crafter's stash is one of the hardest household categories to place, because a thrift store sees a bin of fabric scraps and a quilter sees a year of projects. The organizations that want it are specific and mostly local, and once you know their names the whole stash moves in an afternoon. This page covers creative reuse centers, fiber guilds, school programs, and the two national programs for school and art supplies.
Most metro areas have a nonprofit creative reuse center: a warehouse store that takes donated art and craft materials and resells them cheaply to teachers, artists, and families, often while running its own workshops. They accept what almost no one else will: fabric remnants, partial skeins, buttons, beads, paper, frames, notions, half-used paint, and the odd tools of every hobby. Search your city plus "creative reuse center" to find one; the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse and Lancaster Creative Reuse are typical of the model. Most post a current accept list and hours, and many are at capacity for certain items, so check before loading the car.
Yarn and fabric belong with people who use them. Regional fiber arts organizations such as the Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance and the Textile Center in Minnesota accept yarn, thread, fiber, notions, tools, patterns, books, and equipment, and either resell them at low cost to makers or route them into teaching and charity knitting. Local knitting and quilting guilds take yarn and fabric for group charity projects, teaching new members, and swaps. A guild is also the right place for a loom, a spinning wheel, or a serger that a thrift store would misprice or scrap.
For a stash left behind by someone who has died, Loose Ends is a separate kind of program: volunteers finish the unfinished knitting, crochet, and sewing projects of crafters who have passed away or become disabled, and return the finished piece to the family. It is for projects in progress, not for the general stash, but for a family it is often the most meaningful destination on this page.
Art teachers run on donated materials, and a box of usable supplies delivered in August is worth more than one delivered in May. Elementary art rooms want paper, paint, brushes, glue, fabric for collage, yarn, and beads; after-school programs and summer camps want the same plus anything that keeps thirty children busy. The route is a teacher you know or the school office, because schools rarely have a donation door. Kids In Need Foundation is the national channel for school supplies, but it accepts only new, K through 12 appropriate products, so the used half of your stash still goes local.
Broken and unwanted crayons have a specific home. The Crayon Initiative collects crayons from restaurants, schools, and individuals, melts them down, and remanufactures them into new crayons for children's hospitals; it reports supplying more than 240 hospitals across the country. Individuals can drop unwanted crayons at the customer service desk of Staples stores. Hospitals themselves accept new, sealed art supplies for child life programs, following the same infection-control rules as toys: original packaging, nothing used.
Senior centers, memory care activity programs, family shelters, and community centers use craft supplies constantly and buy them out of thin activity budgets. Yarn, embroidery floss, simple kits, coloring books, and adult coloring supplies go quickly. These programs rarely advertise, so a phone call to the activities coordinator is the whole process. Keep the donation sorted and usable: a labeled bag of complete kits is welcome, a tangled bin is a chore.
Goodwill and the Salvation Army take craft supplies and sell them by the bag, which works for sealed kits and full skeins and poorly for loose remnants. What no destination wants: dried-out paint and markers, glue that has separated, moldy or smoky fabric, rusted tools, and tiny remnants. Fabric under a fat quarter and yarn under a usable length are better bundled as stuffing for an animal shelter's pet beds than offered as craft material. Textile recycling takes the rest.
Last updated September 2026. Errors: [email protected]
Craft supplies fail the thrift store model because they are worth more in aggregate than in a bag, and they need a buyer who knows what a fat quarter or a size 8 needle is. Creative reuse centers solve this by pricing low, sorting well, and selling to the exact people who value the material: teachers buying for a classroom, artists buying by the pound, parents stocking a rainy-day drawer. The model has spread to most cities over the last two decades precisely because ordinary donation channels were pulping usable material.
Teachers spend their own money on supplies, and most of that spending happens in the two weeks before school starts. A donation that arrives in August is stocked before the first class; one that arrives in April is stored over the summer or given away. If your stash is destined for a school or after-school program, hold it until late summer, and it will do twice the work.