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. We began in 2022 in association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Support from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership and others has enabled us to build an enduring project and to use fiber art to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond. Pieces here in Ravelry are my own but the project website has additional works made by many others as a part of this collaborative effort.

This scarf depicts the average amount of water flowing past the USGS gauge at the Ford Street bridge on the Genessee River in Rochester, NY. Blue bars represent mean annual discharge 1952 – 2024; pink beads above some bars mark years that a historic crest occurred. Extreme flood events are occurring with increased frequency as a result of a changing climate. Public health concerns associated with increased flooding include those such as immediate physical health risks (injuries, drowning), mental health impacts from displacement and stress, infrastructure damage to drinking water systems, and increased mobilization of pollutants and pathogens.

This was made in single crochet with a 3mm hook and yarns I had on hand. The mean annual discharge values ranged from ~1600 - 4400 cubic feet/second, data available from USGS here. I divided these values by 1000 to get a number of stitches that could be used for the height of the blue bars on a scarf of reasonable width. The scarf itself is 50st wide.

This piece was created in association with a short-term artist residency supported by the Institute for Human Health and the Environment at the University of Rochester in which we used Wool and Water to explore the connections between water and human health.