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 incorporates data from NOAA’s billion dollar storms database. There are 44 swirly pattern hexagons, one for each year in the dataset beginning in 1980. Most are green but the blue ones are years in which the Northeast climate region experienced a billion dollar storm in the tropical cyclone category. That has occurred in 13 of the last 44 years for this region and these are weather and climate disasters with a cumulative cost of one billion or more. I made a swirly patterned hexagon to mimic a cyclone shape and connected them in Irish crochet style with the mohair yarn. I experimented with many shapes but in the end decided to make a top because I there are already a lot of scarf/wrap items in the Wool and Water collection.

The name is a tribute to Jimmy Buffett whose song by this name was released in 1974 on the AIA album and whom I love and miss very much.