During the summer of 2006 I participated in a doll challenge where contents of a ziplock baggie, ie. studio "trash" was mailed to me. I was encouraged to create art using these oddities that would have ordinarily been thrown to the curb.

Inside my baggie I found leftovers from past projects to include: fabric scraps, fiber remnants, a broken jewelry/chain link, a birds feather, a glass bead or two here, a plastic bead there, paper from a scrapbooking project, and metal tags. As a fiber artist I was drawn immediately to the cloth strips and fiber bits.

I designed a doll pattern to be resourceful, a method that allowed me to use these items to create Sahara, a fabric sculpted art doll. I was able to use most, if not all of the fiber pieces. The largest remnants of fabric I combined to be the main body of the doll. A headdress was made from a tangled mass of yarn and scraps of material that were sewn to her head. The beads became embellishments that finished off her hat. The chain was just the sparkle that I needed! The eyelashes were fashioned out of the feather.

I was enlightened by the fact that trash could be turned into an expressive piece of art. Needle sculpture became the ideal way for me to use up the contents as well as to promote the use of applying "leftovers" in one's art.