During 2020, Common Grace Australia began a campaign to encourage church members to knit scarves that illustrate the changing global climate. These scarves are to be presented to Australian politicians on 21 June 2021 to encourage a greater understanding of the climate emergency. Their pattern is available here and provides good instructions for beginners.

The scarf is a simple rectangle of garter stitch of 40 stitches wide by 600 rows, 6 rows for each year over 100 years. This pattern uses 16 colours in a spectrum ranging from navy blue through paler blues to cream, yellow, orange reds to deep burgundy to illustrate warming temperatures over the last 100 years - 1920 to 2019. A friend used this pattern but with shades of green to brown.

A total of approximately 200g of yarn is used. No colour needs more than about half a 50g ball of yarn and some colours only need a few grams so sharing colours within a group is a good idea. I suggest keeping the unused yarn to crochet on 2020+ as the average temperature for those years becomes known.

I modified the Common Grace global chart using the images on the Show Your Stripes website based on UK Met office and Berkley earth climate data to produce charts for scarves illustrating Global, Australian, New Zealand, Argentinian and Victorian climate change. These charts can be found here in spreadsheet form and are free for anyone to use. I am also willing to add charts for other geographic regions if people have the patience to create their own and are willing to share. Please use the hashtags below if you post images of your completed scarves on social media.

Fellow craftivists, please share this widely and wear the scarves with pride to gently alert others to the importance of acting now to #stopthered. The image of 2 scarves, left, shows the global scarf below the Australian scarf for contrast. In smaller geographic regions, the more extreme temperature years are clearly contrasted with the white of the long term average, whereas the global scarf clearly shows the overall trend from cold to hot.
#showyourstripes @commongraceaus #stopthered #CommonThreads