I remember the first time I saw the full curvature of the Earth.

I could not believe what I was seeing.

The vibrancy, the colors just how thin the atmosphere is against the blackness of space.

In 1978, NASA selected the first group of astronauts that had women.

I had just turned eight years old and that's about the time I said I want to be an astronaut.

I grew up on a lake in Minnesota.

I was drawing and crafting when I was little and asking my mom, can I use the sewing machine?

Can I use the sewing machine?

Apparently, I was a little bit annoying about it.

In college I studied mechanical engineering, got a PhD.

NASA hired me as an engineer.

And I was selected into the astronaut class of 2000.

My first flight was on the space shuttle Discovery in 2008.

When those solid rocket boosters ignite, it's like boom, a kick in the pants and it's like okay, we're going somewhere now.

After about eight minutes, the main engines cut off and we're in space.

I'm like, I did it.

I'm here.

This is the goal I had when I was a little girl.

Unbelievable.

We rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station.

Then there's so many tasks to be done.

With the robotic arm, I had to take the Japanese laboratory out of the payload bay of the shuttle get it onto the space station.

And then, after two weeks, we've landed at the Kennedy Space Center.

I remember thinking, somebody could convince me I've never done it.

You know, if there weren't pictures, because it seemed so dreamlike.

It was just so fast and surreal.

All the way through my time as an astronaut I would do drawing and sewing as a kind of relaxing outlet.

I even went on a couple quilting retreats to learn techniques and just started dabbling in it and trying it.

And now it's my favorite thing to do to turn a picture into a quilted art piece.

My second flight was five years after the first.

I was now married to Doug Hurley who is also an astronaut.

We had a three year old son.

I was launching out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan getting to the space station on the Russian Soyuz.

My mission was going to be six months long rather than two weeks.

The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes.

It is a collaboration between the United States and Russia, Japan, Canada, and the European Space Agency.

The interior part of it is about the size maybe of a five-bedroom house.

It's quite spacious.

One of my favorite things to do was go to the cupola which is a set of seven windows.

There's a round one that faces directly towards Earth.

From there, I really liked taking photographs.

I would see a view and try to get the different textures of Earth from the mountains to the deserts the coastlines and farmland.

You notice the cloud patterns and the different colors of water like in the Bahamas.

It was amazing.

The space station is mostly used for science.

We probably had at least 150 different experiments on board.

And we would do maintenance on all the different hardware because we had a life support system running thermal systems running.

We also do two hours of exercise every day.

When you're living there for so long, there was a little bit of downtime.

This is Mission Control Houston.

One of the things that astronaut Karen Nyberg has been doing on board the space station, she took up some sewing supplies to make a piece of a quilt.

Now that I've tried my hand at sewing in space I can say one thing with certainty.

It's tricky.

You know, you can't, you can't lay things down and measure and cut.

The fabric doesn't, I find myself taping the fabric to a surface.

I'm almost done with, with one single nine-by-nine quilt block that has taken me quite a while a lot longer than, than you would expect.

I'm inviting all of you to create your own star themed quilt blocks.

We'll be combining them with my block to create a quilt for next year's 40th anniversary International Quilt Festival in Houston.

The Houston International Quilt Festival ended up getting enough blocks for 30 king size quilts.

They got over 2,400 blocks from people all over the world over 30 countries.

There were space enthusiasts who had never in their life quilted anything that made a block.

And there were blocks from quilters who were now excited about space, which I think is pretty cool.

From space, there are no borders.

Every border on Earth is imaginary.

Everybody on Earth, we have so much more common than we do different as human beings.

And it makes me just empathize with people more even if I don't know them, I never will meet them.

But they're my neighbors.

We're all neighbors here on this planet.