The Lumberjack



Students Serving The Cal Poly Humboldt Campus and Community Since 1929

Tag: crafting

  • SCRAP Humboldt: Saving the Planet One Scrap at a Time

    SCRAP Humboldt: Saving the Planet One Scrap at a Time

    Affordable art supplies with environmental consciousness in mind

    Doohickeys, thingamabobs and whatchamacallits galore. One local craft store has it all and does so with purpose to provide a community with creative inspiration and affordable art supplies while reducing, reusing, recycling and repurposing.

    SCRAP Humboldt is a craft supply store with hundreds of items available for creative reuse. The store started as a temporary holiday season shop in 2012 at the Jacoby Storehouse and later became an established organization aimed at repurposing items that society would typically deem as waste.

    Malia Matsumoto first began volunteering her time with SCRAP Humboldt and later became the director of the organization in 2017.

    “As an artist, I taught classes at Scrap and volunteered my time to come take care of the store,” Matsumoto said.

    • The storefront counter of Scrap Humboldt in October 2018. | Photo by Chelsea Wood
    • Shelves stocked with various sorted trinkets and supplies in the storefront of Scrap Humboldt in October 2018. | Photo by Chelsea Wood
    • Shelves stocked with various sorted trinkets and supplies in the storefront of Scrap Humboldt in October 2018. | Photo by Chelsea Wood
    • Shelves stocked with various sorted trinkets and supplies in the storefront of Scrap Humboldt in October 2018. | Photo by Chelsea Wood

    As director, she coordinates events, reaches out to similar organizations for cross pollination and manages staff and volunteers at the center. SCRAP Humboldt also works with other local organizations for mentoring programs like the Humboldt Area Foundation.

    SCRAP Humboldt relies heavily on donations and receives items for reuse from community members, businesses and even Humboldt State University. Steady donations also come from partnerships with local businesses that aim to reduce their product waste. Local donors include Los Bagels, Kokatat and the Humboldt Bay Coffee Company.

    Donations are sorted into respective categories and then placed on the store’s floor. SCRAP Humboldt has supply sections for sewing, painting, scrapbooking, holidays, jewelry-making and crafting.

    “Because everything is donation-based, it’s a really low price point,” Matsumoto said. “As an artist or a maker you’re able to get more materials than you would if you went to a traditional brick and mortar store like Michael’s or JoAnn’s.”

    The variety of conventional and unconventional up-cycled items SCRAP Humboldt has to offer gives locals access to affordable art supplies. The organization also hosts weekly tutorial classes to teach the community how to complete projects with repurposed materials.

    Matsumoto and the crew at SCRAP Humboldt have a passion for diverting reusable waste from landfills by finding creative ways to repurpose items that typically wouldn’t be thought of as art supplies.

    Matsumoto said that once people start making things on their own, they begin to see the hard work it takes to create something. Matsumoto said people also learn to give more value to scraps while seeing the potential for an old thing to become new.

    The SCRAP Humboldt team spreads this message and their passion for waste reduction and art creation with the community by offering summer camps for kids, creative reuse classes and a space for an artist-in-residence program.

  • Affordable textbooks for an awesome cause

    Affordable textbooks for an awesome cause

    With a new semester comes a need for new textbooks and class texts. One club on campus, the Society for Women in Math and Sciences (SWiMS), is offering students an affordable book purchasing option.

    Carla Quintero, the president of SWiMS, explains the offer.

    “We are here selling used books which were donated by several people,” Quintero said. “We’re trying to raise money to fund our club’s events.”

    The society has high hopes their book sales will provide students with a much better alternative than the Humboldt State Bookstore or Amazon.

    “I think we can all agree that the bookstore is already overpriced,” Quintero said. “Most people try to find other sources, such as Amazon, to purchase their textbooks. We are selling our books at a fraction of an Amazon textbook price.”

    SWiMS will be using the money raised from book sales to create educational and community-building events for HSU.

    “SWiMS hosts several different events throughout the semester, one of them being Codernoon,” Quintero said. “We have computer science majors who are running this event and teaching people how to code in Python.”

    The club hosts Codernoon twice a week and offers refreshments to participants.

    “Through these workshops, we are trying to break the stigma that coding and computer science is a boys club,” Quintero said. “Coding is accessible and fun. Everyone should learn how to do it!”

    In addition to Codernoon, SWiMS will be using money from book sales to fund Crafternoons, which are crafting events that occur for two hours every other week.

    SWiMS provides participants with crafting materials and lessons on knitting and crocheting. They also offer a space for participants to interact with other majors and destress from their heavy workloads.

    Specifically for STEM majors, Crafternoon hopes to be a space for this group to interact with people outside of their majors. The purpose here is to create a community SWiMS is aiming to establish in their role of being a support group.

    One major event that SWiMS has been pushing to put on annually is a workshop called You Belong Here.

    “In this workshop, we try to inform STEM majors about imposter syndrome, stereotype threat and provide students with the tools to combat these things,” Quintero said. “With these tools, students can move through their respective fields feeling empowered and welcomed because everyone should have the same access to science and math.”

    Money raised from book sales will also be used to host You Belong Here in March.

    To Quintero, being apart of SWiMS means the world to her. As a woman of color in physics, it can be disheartening at times.

    “It can be hard to see yourself in a career when you don’t see anyone else like you in that career,” Quintero said. “The point of SWiMS is for everyone to realize that, while women’s population in the sciences may be small, they still are an important part of the scientific community.”

    Purchasing books from SWiMS will provide the club with the funding to continue their mission of supporting underrepresented groups in the sciences. These include women, people of color, LGBTQIA and other individuals in their scientific journey at HSU.

    Linh Pham is affiliated with Society for Women in Math and Sciences.