The last week or so there seems to be a Space theme in the news but also here at eQuilter. We found out Jeff Bezos is taking an 82 year old female pilot into space. Richard Branson moved up his launch date so he could beat Bezos into space. And…Karen Nyberg…the Quilting Astronaut…has a licensed Thread deal with Aurifil!
In the meantime I’ve been chatting with Jean Wright of the Sew Sisters – the Sewing Team for the Shuttle program in Florida. And today I had lunch with astronaut and author Ron Garan, who I met many years ago at the Johnson Space Center because of eQuilter’s support of the NASA chapter of Engineers Without Borders.
If you’ve read my e-newsletter for awhile, you probably know that our family are Star Trek and Star Wars nerds. I was going to photograph Cosplayers at Starfest and ComicCon before it was cool in our industry. I had my photo taken with Captain Kirk….er….William Shatner. Every year when I am in Houston I go hang out with my EWB friends at NASA JSC. And I have an uncle who had a very close encounter in the Fifties. My dad worked at Lockheed for awhile. So, you know, it’s in the blood I guess. Fabric and Space…go figure.
When the kids were little we visited Kennedy Space Center several times, (see photo above) and more recently I met Victor Glover (first Black astronaut to stay on the Space Station) a few years ago in Houston, where our EWB friends arranged for us to tour ISS Mission Control. All of this is thanks to your support of our eQuilter charity program, and our continued support of Engineers Without Borders projects in Rwanda, Kenya, and Nepal. In fact when Ron was up on the ISS in 2011, our friend Dr. Jack in Mission Control was telling him about our massive quilt drive for victims of the tsunami and earthquake in Japan. Many thanks to all of you who helped us to send 2500 comfort quilts after that disaster, coordinated by Mission of Love.
Perhaps you’ve seen the “Fly Me To the Moon” quilt exhibit or book, on the topic of astronauts and space. One of my quilts in that fantastic project was tapped for an exhibit at NASA several years ago, where I finally met Dr Karen Nyberg.
We are excited to carry Karen Nyberg’s thread set which just arrived TODAY, and to tie this story together in a neat bow, today Ron sent me photos of him and Karen together on the Space Station. Small world huh?
…sharing your love of fabric,
Luana and Paul
p.s. We’ll be uploading a Dairy Barn lecture I gave on ‘International Quilt Trends’, some time tomorrow on our video page.
