3 items
The white bottle with the orange twist cap and the bull on the label — the glue of every 90s classroom, and the raw material of two sacred rituals: peeling dried glue off your palm, and the (never-quite-true) legend of the kid who ate paste.
The plastic-lace keychain craft that ran on camp tables and classroom desks — box stitch, cobra, Chinese staircase — in every neon color the gift-shop rack sold. Depending on where you grew up you called it gimp, boondoggle, or scoubidou, and you made yards of it you had no use for.
The brush-in-cap jar with the unmistakable chemical smell that made art projects actually work. Rubber cement let you unstick and re-stick paper without wrinkling—which meant you could revise, adjust, and experiment without destroying your work. The ritual of painting it on, peeling dried excess, and rolling it into bouncy little balls was as much the point as any finished project.