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.

Healthy streams are home to diverse fish and wildlife, provide vital drinking water, create recreation and relaxation opportunities, and protect against floods. This mixed-methods piece depicts the value of stream buffers and is named for the program by the same name developed by the Lake Champlain Basin Program. This piece represents a hypothetical stream in an agricultural setting and ranges from a poor (nonexistent) buffer at one end to a high-quality, wide and structurally diverse buffer at the other. Stream Wise is administered by AWI in the Saranac Watershed. This free and voluntary program enables streamside landowners to learn about their property along streams with the goal to enhance and protect stream health.

I made this piece using a combination of methods, primarily crochet but there are some knitted sections as well. The stream was done first in Tunisian crochet holding a strand of mohair with a strand of Cascade 220 together. I then worked off of that to create a buffer of varying size and complexity along it with a variety of green yarns I had on hand. Last I added the agricultural fields using the yellow/green cotton yarn and embellished parts of that to look like different crops. I sewed the beads on after the fact to represent erosion from the fields into the stream, which is much higher in the areas without a buffer.