I have a theory that you can learn a lot about a person by looking at the things they refuse to throw away.
Not the important things like the jewellery that belonged to a grandmother or the photographs everyone agrees are worth keeping. I mean the weird stuff. The broken thing you found at a flea market. The button you pulled off an old coat because you liked it. The tiny plastic object whose original purpose you can’t remember. The box of ribbons. The ticket stub. The rock. The ugly mug. The fabric scrap that is far too small to be useful but somehow feels important.
We keep these things for reasons that don’t always make sense.
Maybe they remind us of a person or of who we were when we found that person. Maybe we like the shape, the colour, the texture. Maybe we’re convinced we’ll use them someday or maybe we don’t even know why we’re keeping them. We just know that throwing them away feels wrong.
There is something wonderfully unproductive about this kind of attachment.
We’re surrounded by systems designed to tell us what is useful, valuable and worth our attention. We’re constantly encouraged to declutter, organize, streamline and replace. We’re supposed to know what we own, why we own it and whether it earns its place in our lives.
But a creative life has never really worked that way.
A craft stash is basically an argument against rational inventory management. So is a bookshelf full of books you haven’t read yet or a drawer full of old postcards, embroidery thread, magazine clippings and mysterious bits of hardware that might someday become something.
And maybe that’s part of the point.
The things we keep give us somewhere to wander. They remind us that not everything has to have an immediate purpose. A piece of fabric can simply be beautiful. An old magazine can simply be interesting or nice to hold. A collection can simply make you happy.
This month, we’re looking at The Weird Stuff We Keep: the objects, collections, scraps, memories and obsessions that accumulate around creative lives.
We’re interested in the strange little archives we build without realizing we’re building them. We’re interested in why women collect things, make things, save things and turn seemingly useless things into something else.
Mostly, we’re interested in the possibility that some things are worth keeping simply because we like them.
That’s reason enough.
— AXO
AXO (she/her) is a multidisciplinary creator and editor based in Toronto. She is the founder of She Zine Mag, Side Project Distro, BBLGM Club, and several other projects under the AXO&Co umbrella — each rooted in DIY culture, creative rebellion, and community care. Her work explores the intersection of craft, technology, and consciousness, with an emphasis on handmade ethics, neurodivergent creativity, and the politics of making. She is an advocate for accessible creativity and the power of small-scale cultural production to spark social change. Her practice merges punk, print, and digital media while refusing to separate the emotional from the practical. Above all, her work invites others to build creative lives that are thoughtful, defiant, and deeply handmade.
