Hey there!

Tonight I spent the evening with my quilt guild—the Palmetto Quilt Guild here on Hilton Head—surrounded by the specific kind of joy that only a room full of fabric-obsessed people can generate. And it reminded me of a story I haven't told many people.

Back in 1993, I was working on my Ph.D. in materials engineering. During the day: engineering analysis, statistical regressions, dissertation research. Left-brain work, hard and analytical.

In the evenings, I was hand-piecing a 33-inch wingspan monarch butterfly, using hand-marbled orange fabric between the black wing veins. Right-brain work, tactile and meditative.

I had no idea those two halves of my day were talking to each other.

That summer, I'd been raising monarch caterpillars in my garden, and I got to watch something extraordinary: a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, wings crumpled and tiny, expanding nearly 330% in about five minutes. I was so struck by it that when I needed a term paper topic for a materials selection class that fall, I only half-jokingly proposed writing about butterfly wing design.

That "tongue-in-cheek" paper cracked something open. Researching insect flight, I found an illustration of a hummingbird's wing tracing a figure-eight in the air while hovering—the exact same motion my arms made treading water. Suddenly I understood flight through swimming. Water and air are both fluids, and once I felt that connection in my body, not just my head, the aerodynamics made sense in a way no textbook had managed.

I later built a "2D wind tunnel" using a marbling bath—dragging a carved airfoil shape through the paint to visualize laminar versus turbulent flow, and making fabric prints of the resulting flow patterns.

Here's the part that still amazes me: none of that was wasted, even though GE could never use flapping-wing aerodynamics for a jet engine—turbines need steady, laminar flow, not flapping wings. For years, that insight only lived in my teaching, a story I'd tell kids to help them understand how birds and butterflies fly.

Then, years later, I found out that a team at Purdue actually built it: a twelve-gram hummingbird robot that hovers, turns, and flies guided entirely by AI trained on real hummingbird movement. I didn't discover the principles of unsteady aerodynamics that birds and butterflies use to generate lift. I read about them in a book by Heinrich Hertel published in 1963. But it wasn't until ~2019 that engineers figured out a practical application for those principles.
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Then I used that hummingbird robot as a plot point in my Putney Hicks Inventor Adventures series.

That's the real lesson buried in that quilt. Nothing you learn ever stays in its own lane. A hobby that looks like it has nothing to do with your "real work" might be the thing that quietly hands you the answer to a problem you haven't even hit yet.

If you've ever had a hobby solve a problem in a completely unrelated part of your life, I'd genuinely love to hear about it—hit reply and tell me. I'm collecting these stories for the book, and yours might be exactly the kind of thing another reader needs to hear.

Cheers!

Marsha & Mooney

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