Art & Craft Supplies

Oil paints, craft foam and a cutting machine:

sit at opposite ends of the price scale and age in opposite ways, so each is bought differently. Fine-art materials, meaning acrylics, oils, watercolours, brushes, stretched canvases and heavy paper, are what students and painters look for, and a name like Winsor & Newton or Faber-Castell tells you whether a set is student or artist grade. School craft stock is the cheap end: foam in sheets and large sheets, polystyrene balls and blocks, card, and the glue gun with its sticks. Nobody wants it piece by piece. A sorted box, counted by colour, is another matter. Cutting machines are the expensive end. A Cricut or a Silhouette Cameo cuts vinyl, cardstock and iron-on for stickers, party banners and personalised T-shirts, and many were bought to start a small business that never quite took off. The choice that matters is size: a full-width machine takes a wide mat and most materials, while a compact one like the Cricut Joy costs less and only handles narrow strips. A full-size Cricut costs from about Q2,000 to a little over Q3,000 new, and a Silhouette Cameo lands in much the same range. One that has been used but still cuts cleanly should come in well below that: the buyer will be replacing the blade and the sticky mat soon whatever happens, and an older generation is up against the newest model on the shelf at nearly the same money.

Backstrap looms and foot looms:

have little in common beyond the name. A backstrap loom is a set of sticks, cords and a strap that the weaver tensions with her own body, so the loom itself costs little to make; what gives a listing value is good thread, or a piece already warped and begun. A foot loom is a piece of furniture worked with treadles, the kind that weaves the long ikat-dyed skirt cloth of Salcajá. If one comes up, check that the reed and the heddles come with it, since they set how wide and how dense the cloth can be, and push on the frame to see whether it racks out of square. A finished antique huipil is no longer a supply; it belongs with antiques.

A tube of acrylic, a blade and a test cut:

tell you most of what you need to know about a used lot. Oil paint keeps for years in a capped tube and dried watercolour pans come back with water, but acrylic sets once air gets in, so ask the seller to squeeze a dab from every opened tube. Marker sets need the same care: the Copic name is copied on cheap lookalikes, and a full set with no case, priced like an ordinary pack, is usually one of them. An old paint box kept for its age rather than its use is a collectable and gets judged as one. For a cutting machine, ask for a short video of it going through vinyl or cardstock. Ragged edges usually come down to a dull blade or a mat that has lost its grip, both cheap to put right. A machine that cuts in the wrong place, or grinds as the carriage moves, has the fault that costs real money. And a cartridge-era model such as the Cricut Expression does not connect to Cricut’s Design Space software at all; it works only with physical cartridges, so make sure they come with it.

Before a Cricut, a loom or a box of craft foam changes hands:

for a machine, give the brand, model and generation, how it connects, and exactly which mats, blades and tools go with it. For paints, say how many tubes are still sealed and photograph the opened ones with the caps off. Count school stock by sheet and colour and price the box as one lot. For a foot loom, give the width of cloth it weaves and whether it comes apart to fit through a door. Whoever drives over from Villa Nueva for a used Cricut will want to watch it cut once on your table, so have the mat loaded and a sheet of vinyl ready.