Issuing an artistic challenge to his industrial design students at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., metal artist and industrial design professor Arunas Oslapas took it up himself.  “I asked them to intercept garbage and make something from it—and I’d do the same,” he says.

From a very early age, fiber artist Leena Riker has been working with yarn. “I grew up in Finland in an environment where a lot of things were made by hand,” she says. “I was born before World War II, and during the war, we had to be creative about making the things we needed. My mother taught me to sew, knit and crochet when I was 4, and I kept that up.”

As a child, furniture designer and artist Rachel Sanders knew her future lay in creating pieces for interiors. “I was always reassembling my room,” she says. “It was an ongoing project throughout my childhood. Then I’d go around the rest of the house and make sure everything was just so, sometimes to the annoyance of other members of my family.”

If you’d asked Rachael L K Kurynny just a few years ago whether she’d ever spend her spare time designing jewelry, her answer would’ve been no. “I was always a math and science girl,” says Kurynny. “I wasn’t thinking about doing art.”