Picture this: It is 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, and a room on campus is packed with Greek life members, Japanese Culture Club representatives, Tufts Wilderness Pre-Orientation leaders and student athletes from a Spanish class. What could have drawn them all together?
No, this is not the start of an unfortunate joke. This was the exact thought that crossed my mind last April when I sat on the Crafts Center’s blue couch for a bonding night with fellow TWO staff. On the table to my left were sorority members painting a sign with lavender calligraphy for their spring formal. To my right were members of the Japanese Culture Club making paper sushi cutouts for their upcoming culture show. At the far table, two athletes with gallon water jugs and varsity backpacks worked on a Spanish project, glue sticks and cardstock scattered around them.
It was then that I realized the Crafts Center was something rare. Occupying its own secluded corner of campus — literally, being behind Tilton Hall and under Lewis Hall — lives, grades and interests overlap in unexpected ways.
For those unfamiliar, the Crafts Center is a student-run space that offers free arts and crafts materials as well as an open studio for anyone in the Tufts community. If you are anything like me — a former slime entrepreneur and avid rainbow-loomer — you will find the Crafts Center to be something out of a dream. Inside, it is the IKEA of craft supplies: jewelry-making kits, crochet yarn, printmaking tools, quilting fabric, stamps, woodworking equipment and even a sticker maker. Oil, tempera and acrylic paints sit alongside sumi ink, calligraphy brushes and spray paint available to borrow for the cannon. There’s even a brand-new sewing machine.
Shelves and drawers brim with odds and ends: corks, bottlecaps, LEGO pieces, felt, fabrics and even rescued duvet fillings waiting for a second life in someone’s project. Some of these materials are donated or salvaged from move-out day.
“When people were moving out last year, they left a bunch of stuff in dorm halls,” Jules Justicz, a senior and a Crafts Center’s ceramics manager, said. “I went around and grabbed a bunch of people’s old [discarded items] and dissected a bunch of old duvets.”
And if their extensive inventory still doesn’t impress you, the Crafts Center keeps its best secret in the back: the ceramics room. With wheels, shelves of glazes and kilns, it is free to use once you’ve completed a 30-minute training session.
“I practically live there,” Cristiano Miyawaki, a sophomore and another ceramics manager, said. “It’s one of my favorite spaces on campus, because I can do my hobby for free.”
More than anything, the Crafts Center thrives because of the people who keep it alive.
“It’s also a group of volunteers and a community of people who hang out and bond over a love of crafting,” Talia Tepper, senior and general manager, said.
“We have all different kinds of people there all the time. People finishing an SMFA project, people doing bondings with their team, with their friends, or with a club,” Tepper said.
For Tepper, the space has been an integral part of her Tufts experience from the beginning.
“I actually wrote my ‘Why Tufts’ essay about the Crafts Center because, on my tour, somebody showed me it, and I thought it was so amazing,” she said. “Then [my first-year] fall, I became a volunteer, and I was like, I’m gonna run this place one day.”
Now a senior, Tepper oversees an expanded volunteer team of more than 60 students, many of them first-years, reflecting a recent surge in the center’s popularity.
The Crafts Center appeals to students across campus, especially those who enjoy being creative but are not necessarily pursuing art academically.
“I’m not dual degree or fine arts … I’m just a regular liberal arts major, but I like to crochet, I like to make collages and I like to sew, and I want to be able to make jewelry and get stickers,” Tepper said.
Miyawaki agreed that the biggest draw of the Crafts Center is its accessibility.
When I revisited the Crafts Center this fall, I was reminded why I too can’t help but return. The space is never static: New artwork hangs from the ceiling, new supplies appear on shelves and new people walk through the door. Even the bathroom walls reflect its energy, layered with doodles and ongoing conversations scrawled in Sharpie.
That spirit of change and adaptation is baked into its history. The Crafts Center began in the basement of the Crafts House, a cooperative living and learning community for craft-minded students. But after the ceramics room was deemed a fire hazard, it relocated to the basement of Lewis, where it remains today. Since then, it has disaffiliated from the Crafts House and is now run by its own independent executive board. Still, its mission to be a hub for creativity has remained intact.
For students now, that mission shows up in small, personal ways. As a busy college student, I have often felt like my free time is fought for by my phone — and, let’s be honest, the phone usually wins. The Crafts Center offers a different kind of pause: It reminds me of how I once invented ways to stay occupied, and it feels far more meaningful to throw a vase or make a birthday card than to lose an evening scrolling on TikTok.
In a message to the Daily, sophomore Katie Russo put it more directly: “If I want a second away from work that still feels productive and not like I’m just rotting or something I just pop in for as much time as I have,” Russo wrote.
What truly sets the Crafts Center apart, though, is that it breaks down barriers in ways that feel important.
“The Crafts Center is a really special space for me because I get to learn how to do all of these things by trying them, messing them up and doing them again … that’s how I taught myself ceramics. I didn’t do any sort of ceramics before this … and now I make a bunch of stuff and it’s fun,” Justicz said.
Justicz added that he enjoys teaching others new crafts.
“I think it’s a really unique place, because there’s not a ton of places where you’ll have access to free art supplies … in order to teach yourself [a new skill] and in order to teach other people [a new skill],” he said.
In a world that often favors predictability and can reinforce division, the Crafts Center offers a rare escape — a place where a childlike creativity is prioritized, where scraps become raw material again and where people come together simply to make.
The Crafts Center is open Monday through Thursday from 5–11 p.m., and Friday and Sunday from 1–5 p.m. Clubs interested in using the space can reserve it through a request form linked in the Crafts Center’s Instagram bio.
