The Tempestry Project is personal and collaborative fiber art, environmental awareness, and climate activism via data representation all rolled into a sprawling community of friends, artists, crafters, teachers, scientists, activists, nature lovers, and more.
One of the ongoing problems inherent in discussions about climate change is the vast scale of the conversation. The Tempestry Project’s goal is to scale this down into something that is accurate, tangible, relatable, and beautiful. Blending fiber art with temperature data creates a bridge between global climate and our own personal experiences through knitted, crocheted, and woven temperature tapestries, or ‘Tempestries.’
New Normal Tempestries, inspired by Professor Ed Hawkins’ Warming Stripes data visualization work, depict annual deviation-from-average-temperature from the late 1800s to the present. Each stripe is a year, and more than a century of data is depicted in each piece. The darker the blue, the colder than average the year and the darker the red, the warmer than average the year.
Original Tempestries depict the daily high temperatures for a specific year and location, January at the bottom and December at the top (think bar graphs!). A single Original Tempestry can be a beautiful commemoration of an important life event — a birthday, a wedding, or even (as in the case of one participant) a family’s immigration date. A collection of Original Tempestries showing different years for a single location creates a powerful visual representation of changing temperatures over time.
Tempestries use the same yarn colors and temperature ranges in order to create a visually cohesive narrative across a wide expanse of makers, places, and eras. This consistency is an important aspect of the project, and works through either ordering our kits or using Tempestry yarn* along with your own data.
As more and more people create Tempestries, both individually and in geographic collections, a mosaic of our climate history is beginning to emerge. The more people get involved — through knitting, crocheting, discussing, sharing — the richer, the more beautiful, and the more undeniable this mosaic becomes.
Temperature data comes from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and is available to the public at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search. Please note, the data is not always complete and sometimes has to be supplemented with data from www.wunderground.com, or from nearby weather stations.
A note on yarn: Tempestry Worsted is 100% US-sourced non-superwash wool, custom milled and dyed exclusively for the Tempestry Project in Nazareth & Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Available in 39 colors in 25g (55yds), 50g (110yds), 100g (220yds), and 200g (440yds) amounts as well as featured in all of our kits, both Tempestry and otherwise.