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.

Saranac Lake, NY has a week-long winter carnival celebration every year, a tradition that dates to 1897. A centerpiece of carnival is the ice palace, constructed with ice from and built on the shores of Lake Flower. It is a hugely popular icon of a hugely popular annual event and I am not the only person worried about the impact of warming winters on carnival and the ice palace. In recent years the palace has had to be taken down relatively quickly after carnival because of warm conditions making the ice blocks unstable, this year there is some trepidation that there is not enough ice in the bay to construct it. This piece is a representation of a melting ice palace, done with crochet rectangles and embellished with embroidered fireworks. I used a basic crochet rectangle pattern and increasing proportions of blue in the squares to represent melting ice blocks. I needle felted the blue yarn at the bottom of the palace to also depict a melting effect.