Astronaut Karen Nyberg is totally awesome, and spent some of her leisure time while working on the ISS quilting in microgravity. You can even watch a video of her explaining the challenges of sewing in space. Fortunately for crafty space nerds, she decided to invite the rest of us to join in on this unique crafting experience by sending in star-themed blocks to be joined to her block. The finished quilt will be included in an exhibit at 40th anniversary International Quilt Festival in Houston. This exhibit will also highlight the relationship of sewing to the development of NASA missions and will include sewn samples from spacesuits and parachutes, a cargo transfer bag and other soft goods.

As someone who works at the intersection of sewing and space, this seemed like a great opportunity to participate and get more people excited about how space travel can resonate and touch our lives.

My block's style is more in line with the "compass" tradition, but it looked so much like a star that I couldn't resist using it for this application. The colorway was driven by my desire to incorporate the green fabric with black graphic dinosaur, stars and figure escaping a bell jar. I had designed the fabric as a practice run at making repeating patterns (something lost at this scale), and had it printed at Spoonflower.