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. We began in 2022 in association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Support from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership and others has enabled us to build an enduring project and to use fiber art to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond. Pieces here in Ravelry are my own but the project website has additional works made by many others as a part of this collaborative effort.

Common loon (Gavia immer) is arguably the most iconic ambassador for the lakes in our region. This piece is a common loon suspended in knitted fishing line and representing the threat of entanglement. Loons and other wildlife get tangled in fishing line, especially in the busy summer months. The Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation’s Fishing Line Recycling Program helps to address this problem by providing fishing line recycling containers throughout the park. These are maintained by volunteers and discarded line is sent to a recycling facility in Iowa, reducing threats to loons and other species.

I made this by improvising an intarsia loon pattern in which the background was fishing line and I held the fishing line and the yarn together in the parts with the loon. I subsequently hand felted this to make the loon shrink and kind of meld into the fishing line more tightly and then adorned it with fishing hooks. Pain in the neck to make but it makes the point

This is one of several pieces in Wool and Water that feature birds. Northern New York Audubon supported us to highlight birds in this project during 2022, especially those associated with aquatic habitats.