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 piece is a representation of beach closures on Lake Champlain from 2018-2020, as reported in the 2021 State of the Lake report. The color scheme is inspired by the turtle beach blanket and is meant to represent a beach and increasingly deeper water. It was done in a Tunisian crochet wave stitch and each wave row represents a day between Memorial Day and Labor day. The number of beads in any given row represent the number of Lake Champlain beaches that were closed on that day according to the records for 17 public beaches. Closures were the result of either elevated levels of cyanobacteria or coliform bacteria and data for all 3 years are combined in this piece. The maximum number of beaches closed is 7 for any given summer day in this dataset. The earliest closures occur at the end of June, and the greatest numbers of closures occur in July and August.

Done mostly with TruBoo and a few other random yarns.