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.

This improvised felted bag is a representation of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6: Water and Sanitation. It shows, relative to the size of the bag, the proportion of world population projected to lack access to safely managed drinking water (green, 19%), sanitation (dark orange, 33%), and basic hand hygiene facilities (light orange, 22%) by 2030. Made for World Water Day 2023, the theme of which was accelerating change to solve the water and sanitation crisis. Beads added in the shape of a water droplet, similar to the one on the Goal 6 icon.