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.

The Spada Skating Sweater is a record of the Nordic skating trips on Lake Champlain taken by my friend and wild ice enthusiast Dan Spada. He keeps meticulous records of his trips on Champlain and elsewhere and shared a spreadsheet with me of those data. The sweater represents the number of trips on Champlain for the years 2015 - 2022. The sweater itself is very simple rectangles for the most part, background of reverse stockinette and then on the front I used a cable pattern to try to create something that looked like skate tracks on black ice. The number of raised ridges in each panel corresponds to the trips for that year so there are 8 panels of differing heights across the front. I accented the cables with surface crochet. I borrowed the basic approach from a Patons classic crewneck sweater to make the neckline.