Strangers team up to finish an ambitious unfinished craft project

Shannon Downey has bought several unfinished crafts at estate sales, but never anything like the project she came across this fall in Chicago.

Downey spotted several pieces of white fabric in the shape of hexagons, with some having the embroidered outlines of states. She pieced together that the crafter had planned on embroidering 50 hexagons — one for each state and its bird and flower. Alaska and Georgia were done and New Jersey was halfway finished, but the rest of the states needed to be completed.

Downey learned that the project had been started by Rita Smith, a nurse who enjoyed crafting. Smith died earlier this year at the age of 99, and Downey went on Instagram to see if anyone was interested in helping her finish the project. She immediately started hearing from volunteers, and mailed the hexagons out so they could be embroidered. "This is [Smith's] art, and we're just the hands," Downey told NPR.

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Earlier this month, the embroidered hexagons were stitched together into a quilt that is nearly 8 by 9 feet long. The quilt will soon go on display at the Chicago gallery Women Made, and in March will be sent to the National Quilting Museum in Paducah, Kentucky. "Rita is resting in craft's peace because this is going to be done and it's going to be done in a really epic way," Downey said. "Rita was just a normal person and we're just normal people. It's wildly honorable and worth there being artifact and story and memory around. So, yay Rita!" Catherine Garcia