“Experiments in tactile wayfinding”: That’s what architect Emily Fischer calls her series of Soft-Maps, a series of blankets superimposed with hand-stitched maps of neighborhoods. According to Brooklyn Based, this idea for the textural take on cartography came to her about seven years ago, when her mother’s eyesight began failing. “All of my projects after that were about the other, [non-visual] senses,” she says. (Haptic Lab, the name of Fischer’s company, refers to the sense of touch, as well as the mechanism we employ to situate our bodies in space.) Soft-Maps began with a map of Detroit, where Fischer went to school; upon relocating to New York (for a stint working with Frank Gehry), she returned to the project, concentrating on the neighborhoods around her Brooklyn apartment. (She currently offers designs based on eight Brooklyn ‘hoods, with Manhattan ones to be added starting next month.) The cotton quilts come in three sizes—crib, twin, and queen—and two types. The first, which are mostly machine-stitched, include hand-embroidered bridges and up to five landmarks of your choosing, range from $300-$800 and take about a week to complete. The second—which are completely hand-made and bespoke, with you choosing the place, border, design, and thread color—are $600-$3,200, with a waiting time of 4-5 weeks.