I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. In association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute has embarked on a collaborative fiber arts project supported by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond.

This scarf is a representation of the ice record in Lake Champlain, which has one of the longest documented records of ice in and ice out dates. Ice cover duration on northern lakes has been changing as a result of a warming climate. This was created with a chevron style stitch pattern in Tunisian crochet. Each row represents a year, beginning in 1816 and going through 2019, with blue rows indicating years in which the ice did not freeze. The white rows indicate years when the lake did freeze, with a bead placed in one of three columns to indicate a freeze date in January (left column), February (middle), or March (right column). Freeze dates have shifted slightly later over time, and years without a complete freeze have increased in frequency.

Data: National Weather Service https://www.weather.gov/btv/lakeclose

Pattern: Improvised, but the stitch is a Tunisian chevron https://hearthookhome.com/tunisian-chevron-crochet-tutorial/