Kris Bishop
Woodbridge, Virginia, USA

 

After two years of pain and physical therapy, I had to have surgery on my right shoulder in January of 2003. I designed the front view of my shoulder and arm, and chose the "throbbing" magenta fabric, set against the green background, to represent the pain I was going through. Since I had orthroscopic surgery, they closed the openings with staples or stitches. On this piece, I have many royal blue staples in the shoulder area.

When I was invited to do the Staples Challenge, I remembered having surgeryyears ago, and the doctor used staples to stitch me together. I always thought that was so crazy, and when the Staples Challenge came about, it seemed natural to make a crazy staple piece.

Tempted by the concept of using a "forbidden" technique in quilt construction, I can resist ANYthing but temptation!! The immediacy of stapling as as substitute for quilting in "Staples 1," and for securing the bindings in both pieces, was delicious.

While "Staples 1" is a direct continuation of my Collage series, "Staples 2" developed as I cut "chicklet" shapes from small squares of hand-dyed fabrics and watched the pile of trimmings fall on my cutting board.

The idea for this quilt has been percolating in my head for some time. I had already started it when the Staples Challenge was announced on the QuiltArt list. I used colored staples to couch the bias tape and to quilt the whole piece.

Monique Gilbert-Oversteyns
Bierbeek, Belgium

Nine-patch in black & white & one red. I did reverse appliqué using staples instead of thread. The under-layer is silk from Bursa (Turkey). The dark silk is coming out of the wounds. The backing fabric is fine cotton that Turkish women use to make their beaded and embroidered head scarves. Stars are quilted in metallic thread, as are the circles that are echo-quilted around the circle. I left the joining stitches from the factory in the dotted silk coming out of the circle's center.

My challenge was to use the staples in their raw form -- that is, not colored staples or painted staples or otherwise manipulated staples. As fasteners connecting individual fabric elements to one another, the staples became stitches forming a fabric that is reminiscent of articulated armor.

The fabrics and threads for the interior section of this quilt were collected from the scraps on my workroom floor. These scraps initially were headed for the garbage. Instead, I decided to gather them up and suspend them in plastic wrap. The cut wrappings, combined with the torn edges of various fabrics I've painted for past projects, are stapled to their neighbors and machine stitched to a base of fabric I painted.

Pure Joy, Pure Fun, Pure Freedom, and nothing's better than "Cuttin' Loose"!

Eighteen tiny, hand-painted images of candles (acrylic on paper) float on a square of almost transparent white fabric above a square of collaged newspaper strips. These strips, torn from the financial pages, show the results of a day's stock trading. Framed by a ring of staples, they rest on a backing of painted illustration board. Some nearly invisible stitching holds all the layers together - along with a few dozen pale green beads.

The title refers to a candlelight peace vigil that took place (or didn't, depending on your point of view) in San Francisco's Union Square on the evening of March 16, 2003, just before the start of the war in Iraq. By chance, a young woman who worked, so she said, for the property management company entrusted with upkeep of this outdoor public square happened to be in her office nearby on the night of the scheduled vigil. On seeing people gathered in the square holding candles, she took it upon herself to shoo them away. Amazingly, she succeeded - perhaps because the very hostility in her voice was more than the vigil participants could bear. We had come to the square seeking solace, seeking
community in our grief. What did it matter that the law was on our side? Our grief was too deep, her anger too ugly; we walked off into the night, cradling our tiny flames.

Most of my life, I've lived near Union Square - a refuge for pigeons and green plants and people with tired feet. But lately, changes have come to the square. Money has changed hands; tired feet have been expelled. All the old plants have been uprooted, and a smaller cast of more stylish, more costly plants have been put in their place. New slabs of granite have been laid. The property management woman was worried, so she said, that a drip of candle wax might land on the granite.

This Staples Challenge was a life saver for me. During the time I was making this piece, I was having vision problems that required me to go without a contact lens in my right eye. Being severely near-sighted, working on much of anything was a challenge. I put in the staples by hand, then sewed on the beads. All the while, I was hoping I wasn't going to poke out my good eye while sewing 5" from my face.

The winter weather this year was the inspiration for this piece. We got snow every Thursday for several weeks in a row during January and February.

Not what I originally intended for this challenge, I took my inspiration from the due date -- Tax Day. To create this quilt, I started by printing the $ with the money images and the background fabric -- with tax-related terms printed on it. The border and backing fabrics are vintage silk from Hong Kong. The batting is 100% cotton. The top and bottom borders are stapled on with plain, old, everyday staples. In true tax tradition, I put this off until the last minute and finished it at 12:45 a.m. on the 15th of April. Ahhh, tradition!

As I worked on this piece, I wondered why I bother about specific 'layers' -- like 'clothing' -- that in only a short time will be nothing. So, the three layers of a 'traditional' quilt are found only under the flower parts. The staples were a fun and quick way to get things DONE.

The flowers in my piece are bold and proud, and telling others with the echoing of information of how GOD is good and we worry about too much. Our clocks are ticking . . . time is passing . . . echo the GOOD NEWS!

Matthew 6:28-30 :: New Living Translation (NLT)"And why worry about your clothes? Look at the lilies and how they grow. They don't work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for flowers that are here today and gone tomorrow, won't HE more surely care for you? You have so little faith!"

 

Taking artistic license, my middle fiber layer, between two layers of cotton, is a piece of ceiling tile . . . much easier to place hundreds of staples into the leaves and to bead the vine. A girl just has to have fun!

This whole-cloth mini, reminiscent of old traditional block quilts, was made for the QuiltArt Staples Challenge, but that is where the likeness ends. It is comprised of three layers "stitched" together with lime green staples that pick up the metallic lines in the fabric. The "batting" layer is blue felt, and it peeks from between the fringed-edge layers to become a part of the design elements. The original idea that excited me into signing up for this challenge just didn't work out, thus the "II" in the title.

All of my most creative ideas come to me when I am totally quiet. This image is a reminder for me to allow this to happen. "Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves." M. Maeterlinck.

 

Staples usually bring order by fastening together documents and papers. Here, I'm playing with the idea of staples running wild -- no longer confined to the upper left-hand corner, they have run riot!

Cotton, polyester, cotton and silk threads; transfer printing, hand stitching

Keeping it together on one of "those" days!

I am inspired by phrases, quotes, and symbolism. Staples reminded me of working in an office, which led me to the sayings, "Climbing the Corporate Ladder," and "Hitting the Proverbial Glass Ceiling."

Donna Sinrud
Oakton, Virginia, USA

This quilt was made using discharge fabric and printed with my computer. There is no stitching in the quilt. It was fun tying in the tax date with the staple challenge.

Louisa L. Smith
Loveland, Colorado, USA

As an entrepreneur, a fiber artist, a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a grandmother, I wear many hats. I sometimes feel that I am stretched to the max! Little reminder notes are my life! I seem to function automatically, and I feel I am on a treadmill, constantly moving from job to job. I felt I had to steal time just to be creative! Ironically, I have often stated that I feel I am just barely stapled together.

When this Staple Challenge came up, I could hardly wait to create a self- portrait. I once saw an image of a woman with many hands and many tasks in a visitor's guide, and I realized that was me! I recreated the image for this Challenge.

While musing over how to incorporate staples, I thought about the use of both stitches and staples in surgery, then the emotional context of mending a broken heart -- using staples and stitches to symbolically heal the wounds. Then I went to the Mexican Modernism exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, where I saw for the first time Frida Kahlo's paintings, which are replete with Latin mysticism and overt sexuality. My mind made an intuitive leap: what was the chastity belt but a way to staple women shut, figuratively as well as physically?

Working on a scrap quilt generated a million triangle scraps. Being a ragpicker, I am unable to throw anything away, and I became fascinated with the scraps, especially so with the tiny red triangles that piled up.

They spoke to me. I made this piece as a Journal Quilt, and also as a study for a larger piece. Nobody at work even asked me what I was doing, stapling this small piece over and over. I guess they are used to me and my little "projects." I found out it wasn't nearly as easy as it looked to staple in a straight line, so I let them straggle as they would, between, over, and into the tiny triangles. They came out as a sort of techno-tribal looking little thing. A bit of jumping around with some variegated thread and it was done. Don't know what it says, but it is finished saying it. I always listen when the art talks back to me! This one had fun coming into being.

Layers of security surround me.
Stapled securely, holding firm.
Removable, sharp, shiny, rust
and decay lie somewhere in the future.

"Staples" is an attempt to move into the art quilt realm by using shapes instead of realistic pictures. The quilt is machine appliquéd and quilted. The staples are scattered all over the piece in random spots. The piece is not bound, but instead is decoratively cut on the edge.

Sandra Wagner
Pine Grove, California, USA

The 3D flowers are held on by staples, and some of the fabric is held to the filler with staples -- just plain, everyday staples. The silk paper vase is held on with striped paper clips that I cut and bent, and then forced through the layers to form staples -- thus, the paper clips that line the binding.

detail

"Prickly Blossoms"
16" x 19"

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