ChipScapes Blanket - Memory of Space (Woven, Quilt, Green, Red, Gold)
About the Blanket
Wrap yourself in technology—literally. This woven blanket is designed to be as comfortable as it is meaningful, combining everyday warmth with a quiet tribute to the technologies that shape our modern lives. Featuring a ChipScapes computer-chip image, it works just as well draped over a couch as it does displayed on a wall, adding a distinctive, conversation-starting element to your home décor.
These blankets are made using true textile craftsmanship, not surface printing. A Jacquard loom is digitally programmed to weave the ChipScapes image directly into the fabric, interlacing carefully selected yarn colors—black, white, red, blue, green, gold, and others—thread by thread. The result is a richly detailed, tapestry-style blanket with natural depth, texture, and classic fringed edges formed by the warp threads themselves.
Measuring 50 × 60 inches, the blanket is made from 100% cotton for a soft hand and long-lasting durability. It is machine washable and designed to be enjoyed for years, whether used daily or kept as a display piece.
About the Artwork
I call this artwork Quilt. A few years ago, my family and I visited Amish country in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Amish are, of course, renowned for their quilts, and we spent time studying many beautiful examples of this labor-intensive tradition. What struck me most was how the patchwork—simple shapes and repeated forms—came together into something quietly harmonious. The earthy, restrained color palettes, drawn from the plain fabrics of Amish clothing, felt honest and grounded. That idea of finding art in the ordinary has always resonated with me, and while working on this piece, the patterns immediately brought those quilts back to mind.
The imagery in this artwork comes from a section of computer memory, but not an ordinary commercial chip. This memory was manufactured at Sandia National Laboratories as part of a program to develop space-hardened electronics. The repeating geometry you see reflects the regular structure of memory cells laid out across the silicon. Each cell stores a single bit—either a one or a zero—and is built from a small circuit of transistors arranged as a flip-flop. Once a bit is written, the circuit continuously reinforces that value, ready to reproduce it when needed.
This particular memory technology is CMOS, a design choice driven by both efficiency and reliability. CMOS circuits consume very little power compared to earlier approaches, a critical advantage for spacecraft where energy is limited and heat must be carefully controlled. Like all static memory of this type, the stored data disappears if power is removed, but while energized, the memory is fast, stable, and predictable—qualities essential for spaceflight.
Seen through a microscope, these circuits lose their purely technical identity and take on a different character. The repeating cells echo the logic of quilt blocks, and the ordered layout becomes a kind of textile woven from silicon instead of cloth. The result is a visual bridge between handcrafted tradition and high-reliability space technology—two very different worlds connected by pattern, repetition, and purpose.