Love Letter to Crafts that I Swear I’ll Finish Soon

My mother sent me a message a week or so ago asking if she could use the scrap fabric from my quilt to make face masks. My siblings and I have started a weekly(ish) video chat, now extended to cousins, and at this week’s chat my sister held up the face masks she received in the mail from my mother — galactic quilt fabric.

The quilt pattern is from Haptic Lab in NYC, and is their constellation quilt kit. The first one I put together as a mother-child craft project when some bad stuff was going on in my life a couple years ago; I think my mom bought a bunch of the supplies as an early birthday present for me. That one is queen-sized, and all painstakingly hand-stitched — maybe 1/3rd done.

I remember doing the baby steps of that one in my old apartment on days off from work. Up until that point, all I’d been able to manage to do was get home, shower, fry an egg or two, and then lie down on my living room carpet (plush!) wrapped in a blanket and watch Avatar: The Last Airbender until I had to go to work again. (I hadn’t watched it before, and used at as white-noise-junk-food TV with just enough substance to draw me along while I was awake.) The quilt gave me something to do while watching, bit by bit.

That first (part-finished) quilt is of the Northern Hemisphere, but the second and third ones are of the Southern Hemisphere, assembled while I was on the Ice; poignant then and now because the constellations are so familiar from walks to work during the long winter night. The most recent one is throw-sized and mostly machine-sewn, and I could probably wrap it up in a week or two more — and that one is a gift for a close Ice friend.
High time I wrapped that up and got it in the mail to her.

It is weird to look at the haphazard stitching on it and remember hours spent in McMurdo’s craft room, arguing with the sewing machine and listening to the same playlist over and over.

I remember exactly what I was doing last year at this time, and looking back at those days I wonder what the sky there looks like now at 7:42am, as I’d have been walking to work. I think that past-self would be happy to know where I am now, despite all that is going on.