Inexpensive Art Supplies

C.,
I just went to a place called 'Artscraps' in St. Paul. It's on St. Clair - not too far from Macalester. It has tons of donated supplies: fabric scraps, cardboard, paper extras, magnetic strips, you name it. We bought a big bag of junk for less than $5. The kids have been creating their own collages and other projects all week. We got some glow-in-the-dark paper that has a sticker back - very cool. Yesterday, my eldest covered a sturdy cone in dry macaroni and then painted it. They get very inspired by the ever-changing supplies at the store. Incidentally, they usually do have glue sticks and some other 'normal' supplies, too.

K.

You can go to a teacher store, Sams club or even Walmart or try an online store such as the trading company.

My friend used to buy rolls of butcher paper at Costco for her son to draw on. I have the easel from Ikea so I buy the rolls of their paper that fits the easel. I think its about $5 for a roll there and I don't know how much the butcher paper costs at Costco but I am thinking it will probably be cheaper.
Making you own art supplies is another neat idea. Try familyfun.com or Kaboose.com. Other than the typical playdo recipe they should have recipes for "goop", homemade sidewalk chalk, sand glitter glue, etc etc. Most of the homemade art supplies are made with very inexpensive pantry items. Also using typical household items for art supplies is an inexpenisive idea, when we were in grade school we'd always cut up different vegetables like potatos and "paint" with those. Sponges cut into different shapes work for paint brushes as well.
Good luck and what a neat idea!
K. H

Have you tried Michael's or JoAnn's? They usually have a 40% off coupon in the Sunday Ad. They have a lot of kids arts & crafts stuff.

C. how fun
Via intenet check out Discount school supplies or Oriental Trading company. A local store Ax Man in St Paul on Universtiy Ave just west of Snelling has some really wild stuff to help with the creativity.

IKEA has some art supplies. I'm not entirely sure about the prices but I think they were pretty inexpensive. They have rolls of paper, paint brushes ect.

Hi C. -

Two places I would suggest trying are Sam's Club and Lakeshore Learning Center. We've gotten huge packages of construction paper for pretty good prices at Sam's, and I know they have industrial sized supplies of all sorts of things at Lakeshore. I'm not sure how the pricing is at Lakeshore, but it's a place that's designed to be used by teachers, so the packages are large. They also have a terrific selection of all sorts of fun educational toys and supplies.

L.