Artist Statement
The Baby Blanket is a work about devotion — to friendship, to craft, and to the unpredictable threads that bind and test us.
Commissioned by the father of a childhood friend from East Palmyra, this piece carries the weight of shared girlhood: track practices, choir harmonies, imagined magic in the woods, and songs sung from the backseat of long drives. When given full creative freedom, I approached the blanket as both a technical challenge and a love letter.
At the time, I had been crocheting for only a year. I studied obsessively — counting stitches from Instagram photos, pausing and rewinding TikTok and YouTube tutorials, teaching myself double crochets, slip stitches, and magic circles. Months were spent sketching and organizing patterns in a notebook, mapping out each square before carefully assembling them into a cohesive whole.
Midway through completion, an accident altered the work. While tufting a rug for an upcoming show, I inadvertently cut into several finished squares. What could have marked failure instead became transformation. I dismantled and remade the damaged sections — duck and lion motifs — and reassembled them. To honor the interruption rather than erase it, I added small sewn bows framing those specific squares, subtle markers of resilience and repair.
Shortly after shipping the completed piece — my first commissioned textile work — I experienced another rupture. My cat, Olive, ingested leftover sewing thread I had forgotten to put away. What followed was emergency surgery, financial strain, and weeks of intensive care during a move to a new apartment. Recovery required vigilance, patience, and surrender to uncertainty.
In hindsight, the blanket mirrors that period of my life: fragile, reconstructed, and strengthened through care. The process revealed how making is never isolated from living. Craft carries the imprint of circumstance — of panic, repair, devotion, and community support.
The Baby Blanket ultimately became more than a gift. It stands as a meditation on mending — in fiber, in friendship, and in love. The bows remain as quiet witnesses to imperfection, survival, and the beauty that can emerge when something is taken apart and made whole again.
Artist Statement
The Baby Blanket is a work about devotion — to friendship, to craft, and to the unpredictable threads that bind and test us.
Commissioned by the father of a childhood friend from East Palmyra, this piece carries the weight of shared girlhood: track practices, choir harmonies, imagined magic in the woods, and songs sung from the backseat of long drives. When given full creative freedom, I approached the blanket as both a technical challenge and a love letter.
At the time, I had been crocheting for only a year. I studied obsessively — counting stitches from Instagram photos, pausing and rewinding TikTok and YouTube tutorials, teaching myself double crochets, slip stitches, and magic circles. Months were spent sketching and organizing patterns in a notebook, mapping out each square before carefully assembling them into a cohesive whole.
Midway through completion, an accident altered the work. While tufting a rug for an upcoming show, I inadvertently cut into several finished squares. What could have marked failure instead became transformation. I dismantled and remade the damaged sections — duck and lion motifs — and reassembled them. To honor the interruption rather than erase it, I added small sewn bows framing those specific squares, subtle markers of resilience and repair.
Shortly after shipping the completed piece — my first commissioned textile work — I experienced another rupture. My cat, Olive, ingested leftover sewing thread I had forgotten to put away. What followed was emergency surgery, financial strain, and weeks of intensive care during a move to a new apartment. Recovery required vigilance, patience, and surrender to uncertainty.
In hindsight, the blanket mirrors that period of my life: fragile, reconstructed, and strengthened through care. The process revealed how making is never isolated from living. Craft carries the imprint of circumstance — of panic, repair, devotion, and community support.
The Baby Blanket ultimately became more than a gift. It stands as a meditation on mending — in fiber, in friendship, and in love. The bows remain as quiet witnesses to imperfection, survival, and the beauty that can emerge when something is taken apart and made whole again.
