Hello! My name is Elika and I graduated from Pomona in May. I started working on the project last week, and this is my first blog post! So far I’ve done a lot of taking staples out of documents to scan them, and then subsequently scanning them, which brings me to what I’m going to talk about today: flower-shaped staples.
In order to scan the documents, the flower staples have to be taken out. The only problem is that they’re very unwilling to move, and prying them off of the documents takes a bit of effort. I’ve found the best way of doing this is flipping the document over so the petals are visible. Then I approach each petal with a slightly frightening level of determination, and slide the staple remover under it to make the petals fold over. After all the petals have been folded, the flower is now a crumpled circle, and can be pushed through the other side. Voila. I haven’t been able to find any history about these staples, but it does seem that they were used many decades ago, according to the vintage scrap booking blogs I visited. Enjoy!