What was something you made while at school that you remember still with pride?

The crewel embroidery patchwork giraffe I made in art in high school. My Mom loved it and kept it through all her moves and I had it sent back to me from San Francisco after she passed and have it hanging on my stairwell.

@janbb That’s lovely, you must treasure it now as she must have.

I made a square needlepoint keychain for my dad with black and green yarn (the color of those 80’s monitors). On one side was an ekg blip and on the other was a flatline.

When I was in 3rd grade, we had to make a diorama of something. I made a diorama of the woods, with a beaver and I used natural things like twigs and leaves. Everyone else in the class made more simplistic dioramas. Everyone gathered around when the teacher was looking at mine, and the teacher was exclaiming about how impressive it was.

My childhood artwork doesn’t stand out much to me (there’s one drawing of a city street that I made in 4th grade that I am proud of, since it was a way for me to express my love of maps and city planning that continues to this day). I think my proudest creative accomplishment was a 10th grade assignment to write our own “Canterbury tale”. I wrote a tale told by a guilty unfaithful husband about the escapades of an inkeeper and his wife in a similar situation. I was the only one in my class to receive an A+ on the assignment (which my teacher brought to the attention of the class) and on it my teacher had written “Now this is a real tale! Even a little bawdy.” One of the few school assignments I cared about keeping for posterity. :)

I made a whale out of clay, and it was beautiful after painting and blazing. It was for an art installation at the new City Hall. It broke in transit.

I made a walnut breadboard in 7th grade shop. It was a Christmas present to my mom, it stayed in the family for over twenty years until one day the glue that held it together had dried out.

There are a few:
– A paper mache marionette with hair and clothes
– A ceramic mug glazed and baked in a kiln
– A pastel picture of a young boy holding his dog while on the scales

In 7th grade I made a metal bracket for house sign to go under a mail box.
It had tapered ends and a black, hammered finish. It was so fancy my parents never put it outside. Actually our mailbox was mounted next the front door so my dad had no place to put it.
It is long gone – probably used for another project somewhere.

A can crushing machine back in shop class (or whatever the hell they called it then – probably something like design technology) in the early 80’s. It was hand cranked to move the cans from the hopper through the mechanism but the actual crushing was done by some piston things my dad had got for free from a local engineering firm. They could probably crush the engine block of a tank. Complete over kill but it did crunch cans flat.

I made the boys (and girls) in my 6th grade class bow down to the queen of arm wrestling.
All except the last two, that is.
I’ll take Joe and Mario on to this day. XD

The Spoonbill Migration project is an annual tradition for the architecture department at Berkeley.

I created my spoonbill sculpture using bullet shells (that I had hammered down) for the feathers in its wings. (A nod to the spoonbill making its home in a DMZ.)

Many of my professors that I really respected told me it was the best one they’ve seen in all of the years that they’ve held this event. Someone in the CED office ended up buying it.

But what made this project particularly memorable was probably how I got those bullets. I went to a local gun shop and ended up talking to this white supremacist (legit swastika tattoos) about haute couture. It was pretty surreal. Haha