♪ Man: Computational origami is quite useful for the mathematical problems we are trying to solve.

We try to integrate the math and the art together.

I kind of like it.

Woman: Climate change is scary.

It's terrifying.

But artists can translate the science so that everyone can understand it.

Second man: Biology is the study of life, and I carve feathers into intricate art.

People say I capture the essence of the birds.

I kind of just feel them in my body.

Third man: Through generations of passing knowledge from person to person, people in our family make very distinct pottery.

Fourth man: It is a cultural science that 50 years ago we didn't even think was scientific.

[Rockets roaring] Second woman: My mission was going to be at the International Space Station.

Now that I've tried my hand at sewing in space, I can say it's tricky.

♪ Erik Demaine: The motto of MIT is "mens et manus," which is "mind and hand."

So, it's not just about thinking about things and solving problems in your head, but it's also about physically doing things.

My dad and I started getting interested in art and craft because we were trying to solve math problems.

We'd work on a problem, get stuck, and then build something that helped explain it.

♪ Erik: Computational origami is quite useful for the problems we are trying to solve.

♪ As we made more and more models to understand what was going on geometrically, at some point, those models started looking beautiful.

♪ Now we try to integrate the math and sculpture-making together.

The more we do it, the more we view them through the same lens.

At least, I like to think about art also as a problem-solving endeavor.

I'm a theoretical computer scientist, and usually we're trying to understand what problems are easy for computers to solve versus which ones are hard for computers to solve.

But I got interested in folding just because it seemed interesting mathematically.

Martin: I was curious about becoming a lawyer.

I went to law school for a term and decided I definitely did not want to be a lawyer.

Ha ha.

So, I headed to northern New Brunswick, Canada, and I built a log cabin.

It made me not afraid to try anything.

I home-schooled my son.

I became a single parent before he was three.

What I decided about learning is that it's not what you learn.

It's to become excited about learning.

I think our first collaboration was the "Erik and Dad Puzzle Company" when I was five and six years old.

We made and sold wire take-apart puzzles to toy stores across Canada.

I helped design the puzzles.

Marty made them all.

And then we split the money 50-50, which was pretty cool as a six-year-old.

In the beginning, Erik wasn't interested in math.

So, there was no pressure to do math.

Erik: I was playing lots of Nintendo.

I asked my dad, "How do people make video games?"

And a neighbor had one of the early personal computers.

We borrowed it and made a video game.

♪ I took advanced calculus, and then I really saw the beauty in mathematics.

You have this ultimate truth.

You can prove that some theorem is true and know for sure that that is true.

I think there's no other aspect of human existence where you have that kind of certainty.

♪ What was it like to be a 12-year-old in college?

It was great.

Ha ha.

My peers, of course, were much older than me.

They treated me like any other student.

They invited me to parties.

They tried to keep the drugs in another room, I'm told.

So, I didn't know that was happening.

But I ended up doing undergrad in two years, and then it's like, "Well, I want to learn more stuff.

So, I guess grad school?"

And I saw this world of origami mathematics that seemed really cool.

Finished my Ph.D. when I was 20, and I was lucky enough to get a job offer at MIT.

The unusual thing is that, when Erik was offered a job, they also offered me one because we had a reputation for working together.

Well, it's not bad.

That's a good test.

Erik and I have published a hundred joint papers.

Erik: Interesting.

Martin: The most important problem now is to prove that mathematically these curved forms exist.

♪ We use a ball burnisher to put indentations into the paper.

When we first started folding paper, we used a laser cutter, and then we decided everything had to be handmade, every step.

Erik: The paper wants to fold along the score lines, but we have to really encourage it and go around all the creases.

As we do that, the paper just pops into this 3D form.

Nice.

It's a very simple constraint in origami that you're not allowed to stretch or tear the paper.

And so, all you're allowed to do is to form it by folds.

It makes it a little bit harder... it makes it a lot harder, to be honest.

Martin: You're doing a better job than I am.

Erik: When we started working in computational origami, I think part of the appeal was that it seemed "useless."

♪ But years later, it turned out that, if you want to build a structure that can change its shape, folding is a pretty natural way to do that.

♪ Like, if you want to make a giant telescope lens in space, you first need to fold it up into something small so you can put it in a shuttle to go into space, where it can then unfold.

So, origami is actually super useful for engineering and medicine and things like that.

♪ Let's go up maybe.

Martin: Yeah.

Erik: My dad and I had been trying to understand the mathematics and explain how paper behaves in curved-crease folding, and we were starting to realize, hey, the geometry is cool.

Let's try to make them even more beautiful.

Martin: No.

I kind of like it.

Erik: Around that time, MoMA contacted us and said, "Hey, we're doing this show.

It's about science and art.

Got any cool objects?"

Martin: That was quite a surprise.

And so, it ended up in their permanent collection.

I guess rarely does an art career start with MoMA.

♪ And soon after, various galleries would say, "Hey, we're doing a show about paper.

Are you interested?

"Hey, we're doing a show about book art.

Do you have some pieces?"

And so that became, "Let's make more and more sculpture and explore that deeper and deeper."

♪ Now, the main idea is we're threading, um... a string or a few strings through a series of disconnected components such that when you pull the string tight... now this is, like, a pretty stable structure.

You could, like... Erik: I think I tend to attract the students who are also interested in building physical manifestations of their work.

That means there's two strings going through that tube.

It's not always easy to do that in mathematics.

Woman: Exactly, yeah.

Erik: But I think it enriches the whole experience.

Martin: So, the shape of the pieces might affect it, I think.

Erik: A couple of years after being at MIT, I get this phone call from the MacArthur Foundation, and they're like, "You've won this award."

The MacArthur Fellowship exists to say, "That's cool that you're working on things that other people don't explore."

That confirmation for me sort of encouraged me to go even more in that direction and explore the more obscure things and whatever I found exciting was okay.

♪ Martin: As an artist in the Sixties, I tried different things, and then I saw glass in a school in England.

I spent nine months there and then returned to my log cabin and started a studio to make art glass.

♪ Erik: I had never seen my dad blow glass before.

It was all before I was born.

Martin: Lighter air.

Erik: At MIT, he just jumped back into glass-blowing, and then I got to learn to blow glass so we could play in that space together.

♪ Martin: We've evolved blowing these hollow forms, and then the idea was you can't just have a plain glass vessel.

And one of the techniques is almost randomly putting hot glass over the glass, and that produces an optic effect that distorts what you see inside.

We wanted to combine these two interests that we have of blowing glass and paper sculpture.

[Tap] Those are two materials that generally aren't thought of belonging together.

This is the complete works of Shakespeare but only the words that have "red" in them.

Erik: I see "Frederick, labored, favoredly."

All of these have red highlighted in the middle.

Martin: Here's a folded one, and we're going to imbed this paper inside the blown-glass vessel.

One in.

♪ Yeah.

♪ Erik: Sculpture, I guess, is not a normal activity as an MIT professor in computer science.

Oh, that's nice, staying coiled like that.

Martin: Whoa!

That's awesome.

Erik: But I think, for us, it's really a benefit to have two careers instead of one.

♪ Doing art, we inspire new mathematics, then doing mathematics, we inspire new art.

♪ [Sanding and scraping sounds] Joan Takayama-Ogawa: I think some of my most interesting art comes out when I am just pissed off.

♪ Environmental issues have been a theme throughout my life.

♪ And our addiction to fossil fuels has very serious consequences for the entire globe.

Climate change is depressing.

It's scary.

It's terrifying.

[Flames crackling] But artists must be leaders, and leaders must be artists.

♪ Clay transmits all of my feelings.

♪ If a person is drawn in by a piece of my art, maybe the story I'm trying to tell about climate change will reach them.

♪ I did not begin my ceramic journey until I was 30 years old.

I had a career prior to that as a teacher, and I decided to enroll at Otis College of Art and Design extension ceramics classes.

Joan: You want this blended in, huh?

Woman: Yeah.

Joan: I had no art background when I arrived at Otis.

Zero.

But as soon as I touched clay, I knew that this was going to be something I could do for a very long time.

My mother was actually a beauty queen, and my father was in U.S. military intelligence during World War II.

He was educated as an architect.

He could draw anything.

He could build anything.

And so, when I told my parents I was gonna quit my job at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, my mom looked like she was going to go into complete cardiac arrest, and my dad said, "You've finally come to your senses."

♪ Otis College of Art and Design has a hundred-year history.

The first campus was close to downtown Los Angeles.

Many prominent Los Angeles artists at some point graced the halls of Otis.

Peter Voulkos arrived in 1954.

Voulkos could throw beautiful pots, and he started tearing them apart, abstracted them.

Pete Voulkos opened the doors for all of us to create much more expressionism in clay.

[Indistinct voices] I became a faculty member at Otis, teaching English, and faculty can sit in classes.

I, of course, took ceramics classes.

Ralph Bacerra was in charge of the program.

♪ He taught us so many technical skills, from glaze chemistry to plaster mold making to potter's wheel, handbuilding, slab building, coil building.

It was rigorous on all technical fronts.

♪ It was the Harvard of American ceramics.

But when we moved to the new campus, Otis closed the ceramic program.

Later on, the school decided to bring it back, and I was tapped as the ceramic instructor.

Woman: The idea is to make this part blue and then cover the whole thing in red.

Joan: So, if you do the bottom side first, then you don't mess up anything.

Woman: Yeah.

Suhn Lee: Joan's biggest influence is her belief in her students.

Joan: What are you gonna do on the stripes?

Her belief is so matter-of-fact, so strong that you start believing yourself.

[Indistinct voice] Joan: These are going off to your first gallery, huh?

Lee Kawasaki: This one just came out of the kiln.

Joan: That's sexy.

Really sensitive glazing.

I've been an extension student of Joan's for the past year and a half, and just from, I think, day one, she really took an interest in my work.

Joan: I have met so many interesting extension students.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Yeah, somebody's gonna cut themselves.

You're gonna draw a little blood with that one.

I really like, um, surfers because they have strong upper-body strength.

I also like dentists and orthodontists because they have good hands.

Lee: That's why I... Joan: Wait.

Same problem.

Lee: Yeah, I can't sell those, but... Joan: You won't ever do that again.

Lee: No, definitely not.

Joan: Right?

Hmm.

JoAnn Staten: Joan really helped our ceramics department recapture that past prestige.

Her work has appeared in the Smithsonian and just been in a lot of different museums internationally and nationally.

Her shows are taking on environmental issues through representations in clay.

♪ Joan: My brain and my heart are connected to my fingertips.

That's how I transmit my thinking.

♪ As we create more greenhouse emissions, we have atmospheric tipping points.

So, I have one cup that's tipping with SUVs spilling out.

♪ And then I did another one with little sushi that have oil derricks on them along with all these contributors to climate change... ♪ Whether it's airplanes, cars, or the way we produce food in America, overconsumption is what we do best.

♪ About 2009, one of my students came back from Christmas vacation with a bagful of bleached coral, and she gave me a few pieces, and she said, "These are all over the shores of Guam, and our coral reef is sick."

♪ And she said what used to be the colorful coral is now just turned white, breaking apart, and landing on our beaches.

The warming oceans are creating bleaching events and because the coral are so sensitive, the entire ocean ecosystem is under pressure.

♪ I carried that bleached coral in my apron for a couple years, thinking about it.

And finally I decided to switch my work from flamboyant, colorful theatrics to all white.

♪ I started thinking of the bleached coral events as the canary in the coal mine, warning us of climate disaster.

♪ I think this is the next step in the climate change series.

It's called "Water Warrior," and it is about the future issues of rising sea levels but also of potable water for people.

We can all do our part to decrease our carbon emissions... like growing your own food or buying what you need and not waste your food and throw it out.

We can avoid climate disaster, and artists can translate the science so that everyone can understand it.

♪ Chris Maynard: Feathers are symbols of our aspirations... of flight and hope, kind of our dreams.

♪ Those ideas are why I chose to use feathers in my art.

♪ People say I capture the essence of the birds, and that's really a compliment, because I like to feel them, like kind of just feel them in my body.

♪ Biology is the study of life.

Birds shed their feathers, and I carve them into intricate art.

This feather is from an Asian jay, and this is about as small as I go.

This is part of the wing.

It's not the main wing feather.

They're little... coverts they're called.

They cover up the other feathers.

And it just has these little bits of blue on them.

I want to support laws that protect birds.

Most of my feathers come from natural shedding in zoos and private aviaries.

So, I can be sure that they're legal.

[Drawer rumbling] This is from an argus pheasant, some of the biggest, most heavy feathers in the world.

These are the primaries.

It's what the bird powers its flight with.

And these are the secondaries, and on most birds, secondaries help the bird just float in the air.

These are beautifully patterned.

So, the bird uses them for display, kind of like a peacock.

But when its feathers are all tucked in, it just blends into its forest background.

Feathers are made out of keratin, which is the strongest of animal materials.

It's like your fingernail, but then inside, it's more pithy because the other thing about feathers is they're really light.

♪ Another function feathers have is to enhance the bird's sense of the environment.

This is like one big lever that goes into the bird's nerve-rich skin.

Each flight feather is attached by a muscle and a tendon.

So, they can move those feathers more or less separately.

They can do things that we can barely imagine.

♪ I grew up near Seattle.

My father was an eye surgeon.

My mother was a professional artist.

But having three sisters and no brothers, mostly I would just go out and explore the woods.

[Birds calling] I was a biologist, and I focused on entomology.

I do know the plants and the creatures.

And then I worked with the hydropower industry.

I was sitting behind a desk in meetings.

So, 10 years ago, I was thinking about, "What's my mission in life?"

[Birds calling] And it appears to be to foster appreciation and understanding of the natural world.

My father used these glasses for eye surgery.

I need them, especially as I get older.

And these were my dad's tiny little forceps.

They're grooved so they don't slip back and forth.

And these were his scalpels.

They're really sharp.

♪ My mom really encouraged creativity.

She would teach classes in her home and paint.

After she died, I got her notebooks, and I'm looking through one of them, and there's birds that she just probably saw outside the window, went... ♪ From her drawings, I've made some pieces.

I wish she was around to see the results.

♪ I'm carving these little bugs from feathers of the Central American ocellated turkey.

They're shiny, like a bug.

So, I'm making what I call "bug bird."

I want to honor the birds, and I want to honor the feathers.

I could paste them flat against the background, but I don't.

I pull them away so that they have their natural curve.

Voila.

♪ When I photograph it, I want to get the light just right so that I can capture the shadows.

What I feel is important is this feeling of space and design... and also a feeling of motion.

♪ I have a barn that the swallows love.

In the spring, there's hundreds of them.

♪ When I'm watching the swallows, I have this kinesthetic sense of soaring with them.

♪ I like to dance, and I get that same feeling of lightness.

♪ My art is seen all over the world.

♪ And if somebody can see feathers in a different way, hopefully it can give them a new perspective on the natural world.

♪ Come on in.

Come on in.

Come on.

Ha ha ha.

[Pencil scratching] For me, everything starts with the pencil.

The pencil is the application of the thought to the paper.

So, you start just fooling around with a direction.

And once you see the direction, you begin to see that this could work in this space.

Then the idea begins to develop to be able to be functional and built.

♪ I'm dealing with glass, steel, water, and light.

So, all of the senses can be experienced-- seeing, hearing, touching, smelling.

♪ There's never a boring moment.

That's the beauty of being an artist.

♪ [Welder crackling] I've got a lot of different ideas going all the time.

[Grinder whirring] I'll be working on something for 40 minutes, and then I go to something else.

It's just my nature.

[Glass rattling] Goldi Luebtow: John is like an overgrown eight-year-old.

It's either full speed ahead or stop.

Nothing in between.

♪ John: I remember, my first week in kindergarten, we did drawing, we did cutting things out.

We were just having fun as kids.

♪ Friedrich Froebel was the inventor of kindergarten.

In the seventies and eighties, I spent time studying his work.

Froebel was born in Germany.

His father was a Lutheran minister.

In university, he studied botany, mathematics, and he was an apprentice of Samuel Weiss at the Museum of Crystallography.

Samuel Weiss was one of the discoverers of how crystalline structure develops.

The drawings of Samuel Weiss show how the cube grew to the other crystalline forms.

♪ After having an education in sciences, Froebel worked as a teacher.

That changed the rest of his life.

[Xylophone playing] You know, as a little kid, I wanted to be an architect.

But in college, architecture was mathematics.

So, I got into majoring in art.

I started working in clay.

I loved the feeling of it, you know, how you could manipulate it.

So, I got a master's in ceramics, and then that's when I went to Europe.

♪ I was working with the Queen's Royal Blue Delft Company.

They established a factory in Delft in 1653.

We built ceramic murals, some that were 50 by 150 feet.

In the Netherlands, I also worked with Leerdam Glass.

I saw transparency, translucency, and all those qualities of glass that everything else in the sculptural world did not have.

I was kind of wooed into that glass world, and I said, "I've got to do this."

♪ The educational system pre-1800 was rote learning, strict discipline.

The teachers were dictators.

And then Froebel published his philosophy in 1826.

For him, the "kinder" is the child, the "garten" is for planting things and growing.

So, within the mind of the child, that seed would grow, and he helped nurture that growth with his kindergarten teaching system, which is based on the crystalline structure concept from Samuel Weiss.

♪ Cube, cylinder, and the sphere.

By spinning this cube, it becomes a cylinder.

And this one, when you spin this cylinder, it becomes a sphere.

Froebel began to break it down into its elements.

The solid cube becomes a fragmented cube.

The children begin to arrange it in the different ideas.

So, this is the gift of knowledge, like mathematics-- halves, quarters.

The gift of beauty is to take the shapes and to arrange them into any kind of a pattern.

And the gift of life.

The children create buildings out of blocks, chairs out of blocks.

After the block system, they play with parquetries, paper cutting, paper folding, peas and sticks.

So, Froebel was presenting objects for the children to learn through sense perception, experiential contact with the world.

♪ When I got back to America, I didn't have a job, but I found a teaching position in L.A. And I liked it because it was fun.

My approach to teaching is actually Froebel-derivative because it deals with opening up freedom of expression and freedom of feelings, but in order to express that freedom, you have to have the techniques.

And I always felt that you must understand your media in order to create anything.

♪ I made a series of small blown forms.

I played with this idea.

I thought, "That's kind of cool.

That's fun."

But once I took this apart and I looked at this form, I saw it standing 10 feet tall.

Now, in order to make that 10 feet tall, you have to have furnaces that are big enough to be able to put the glass in to bend it.

So, I built a walk-in kiln.

You start with a flat piece of glass, and you put it into the kiln suspended over the mold.

We used steel pipes.

We run that up to a temperature of about 1,100 degrees 14 to 16 hours to get to the bending point.

Then the cooling takes three to four days.

Man: 1, 2, 3, up.

John: Once those pieces are bent in the large kiln, then we transfer those to the taping table.

Goldi: He does all that taping singlehandedly freehand, and they're perfect.

John: From the taping process, I wheel them into the sandblast booth.

[Sand spraying] Once the piece is sandblasted, the surface is etched, then we bring it in the studio, remove all the tape.

So, the pattern then is finished.

♪ In 1817, Froebel built a school in Keilhau, and then, in 1837, the kindergarten in Bad Blankenburg, which is over the hill.

And he would hike back and forth.

It's about nine miles.

From there, Froebel's system spread around Germany and then around the world-- England, Japan, Russia, the USA.

Woman: Can you open the door and put your finger in?

Girl: I opened it.

Woman: What can we do with these blocks?

John: The Froebel System was kind of lost in the mid-20th century, but it's really coming back.

[Indistinct voices] John: Froebel USA is trying to get this into the kindergarten system today.

-I made a rocket ship.

-I made a square rocket ship.

[Indistinct voices] John: It's the rebirth of freedom in education.

♪ Now, this is controversial, but Froebel's kindergarten is the origin of modern abstract art.

♪ Children learning that system became 20th-century painters, sculptors, designers.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, "In 1876, my mother went to the Philadelphia World's Fair and saw the presentation of the kindergarten system," and he says, "When my mother introduced these blocks to me, they changed the way I saw the world."

Piet Mondrian began as a teacher.

So, he knew the Froebel system.

I think that he integrated that totally into his work.

Another perfect example is Buckminster Fuller.

He said, "I discovered my geometric structures, my geodesic domes, from Froebel's peas and sticks."

♪ Goldi and I went to Germany in 2019.

We went to his birthplace.

We went to where his schools were.

Goldi: John's got Froebel on the brain.

Ha ha ha.

So, we trekked the Froebel trail and went up the hill.

John: And on the top is a monument to him-- the cube, the cylinder, and the sphere, 10 feet tall almost.

I'm getting goose pimples now because it was just something, "This really exists."

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

You're up.

We got it.

We got it.

Go up.

Perfect, perfect, perfect.

I learned so much about life from Froebel.

♪ His ideas connected me to a whole new world, a visual world.

♪ ♪ Joseph Youngblood Lugo: Pottery is such an integral part of our family, and things like where to dig for clay and the polishing method, how to fire the pieces, those traditions have been in our family every single generation for the last thousand years.

I knew it was important when I went on a field trip to a museum and my mom's pot was in there and her mom's pot and my great-grandmother's pot.

And my teacher was like, "Oh, my goodness.

That's your family?"

Charles King: Sergio and Joseph are brothers.

They come from Santa Clara Pueblo.

Each Pueblo has a different style of pottery that they traditionally make, and it really is based on the type of clay that is in the surrounding area.

Joseph: New Mexico has so much variety and types of clay.

-What is that?

-Oh, that's cool.

So, this is really pigmented stone.

So, this we would pulverize to make slip.

And we'll find different colored ones, and that's why you get variations of different types of reds.

Joseph: I've been working with clay since I was about three.

I was told by everybody, "You're gonna be making pottery."

It's kind of...

It's expected.

♪ When we build the pots, we use what we call "puki," and it's basically just a premade bowl.

It's all coil-built, and a lot of the process is dependent on the weather.

You don't want it to be humid, because if your piece is too wet, it will collapse.

It won't be strong enough to hold its own weight.

But if a piece dries out too much, the coil will crack.

A lot of it is just feel and knowing from experience.

♪ Charles: Joseph Lugo, his pieces are thoughtful, and he really thinks about Pueblo culture, Santa Clara culture in particular, as the foundation for the pieces that he makes.

♪ Joseph: Unlike pretty much every other tribe, we make our pieces very thick.

So, we are able to carve very, very deep and create a lot of dimension.

Sergio: I had my first show when I was seven years old.

It wasn't something I really wanted to do.

And I took a break for a very long time.

And one day I just...

I fell in love with it again.

♪ It's really cool to show people what you can create with your hands.

♪ Sergio Lugo is part of this younger generation that take traditional aspects of the work and make it part of their contemporary world.

Sergio: The awanyu, or the water serpent, is a protector of water.

I created my own water serpent.

I wanted to make it more modern.

I've always thought that, um, polishing is the most technically difficult part.

We're using just basic materials, a mixture of clay and water to make slip, and polishing stones.

Sergio: No glaze at all.

Everything is traditional method.

Joseph: We all use in the family our grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's stone.

And just knowing that it's passed so many hands, it gives me a lot of confidence to do the same thing that they did.

♪ Charles: At Santa Clara Pueblo, the people were farmers.

So, typically, the women made pottery.

Men might paint or design pieces, but they didn't necessarily make pottery.

Joseph: Pottery was meant for utility and for ceremony.

But in the late 1800s, when the railroads were developed, they would stop at every Pueblo, and there would be people selling pottery.

Charles: About 50 years ago, the men began to make pottery as well.

♪ Generational knowledge is passing information from person to person.

One person that did a lot of that was my great-great-grandmother, Sera Fina Tafoya.

She had different types of impressed pieces, painted pieces.

And she was a massive influence to the next generation after her.

And especially my great-grandmother, Margaret Tafoya.

Charles: Margaret Tafoya is one of the most important Pueblo potters of the past century.

She's one of the few potters that won "Best of Show" twice at Sante Fe Indian Market two years in a row when she was already in her eighties.

So, they come from a lineage of extraordinary potters.

Joseph and Sergio's mother, Nancy Youngblood, is also one of the leading potters working today.

Sergio: We still ask her for input, all three of us, my brothers.

She's taught us to make everything handmade, hand carved, hand polished, traditionally fired.

♪ Charles: It is a cultural science that is about Pueblo life, Pueblo art, and it's all learned knowledge.

That's something that we're starting to understand as a really important part of science today, um, that fifty years ago, we didn't even think was scientific.

♪ Sergio: There's so much time and effort you put into a piece of pottery that you don't want to lose it to the wind or a major temperature change.

♪ My mom created this shed to control all of that.

Each pot is red before the firing, and the firing dictates if the pot is black or red.

[Whoosh] [Flames crackling] Joseph: When we started the fire, the pieces were getting sooty.

Once we put the boards on, the fire gets really hot, and all of that soot starts to burn off.

[Flames crackling] Chris: You have to look in and see exactly when the soot is burning off the piece.

- I'll get them.

- Still sooty on Joe's.

Chris: If it gets overfired, the piece will dull out.

Sergio: It's starting to burn off here, too.

Joseph: When it reaches that perfect temperature, the finish is very shiny.

Oh.

[Flames crackling] Yeah, my pot's done.

Chris: Once it kind of reaches that molten stage, that's when we cover it with manure.

Joseph: The shredded manure keeps all of the smoke inside.

Beautiful.

That's how the color change is happening.

It's a chemical reaction of the manure and all of the smoke.

We've covered the fire now, cutting off the oxygen.

If you didn't cut off the oxygen, the pieces turn brown.

And they're just sitting in, like, a cloud of smoke right now.

Let's get it nice and packed.

Just making sure that temperature goes down slowly is the key to a successful piece.

♪ We don't know the scientific detail of it, but we know what happens when you do certain things, and we know it works.

♪ [Blows] Just wipe it a little bit.

Joseph: It's a whole lot of work, but when it comes together, it...it's magical.

[Blowing] ♪ Sergio: After everything is clean, we've got to sign the wall.

You know, I look around, and I see dates and history and relatives.

I can add my name to that and keep it going.

♪ Joseph: I think that, 500 years ago, they would have had no idea that we would still be doing this.

But it is because of the resilience that they had that we have continued to pass it through every generation.

♪ Karen Nybergt: 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 Ph.D. 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.

[Rockets roaring] 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."

[Rockets roaring] 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.

Whew.

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 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.

[Rockets roaring] 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 down time.

Man: 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.

Karen: 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 lay things down and measure and cut, the fabric doesn't-- I found myself taping the fabric to a surface.

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

♪ ♪ Watch all episodes of "Craft In America" online, with additional videos and more.

Visit "Craft In America" at pbs.org.

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