This quilt is one of a series of quilts I generated following Election Day 2024. There were so many changes to laws, funding, access – especially related to my discipline and my research – that I used my sewing machine for Processing the Policies. Explore the collection.

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Following on from the other quilts I was motivated to create after the 2024 election results were announced, the topic of climate change immediately entered my mind and needed to be quilted. In Spring Semester 2017, I was teaching Earth science courses that relied heavily on information and data sets found on the websites of federal agencies such as the EPA, NOAA, Department of Energy, etc. – especially information relating to climate science. As the semester progressed, I couldn’t believe that climate data and details were vanishing from web pages I had regularly used. I quickly entered into a mode of double- and triple-checking websites up until I entered the classroom to ensure that I would have access to what I needed to use with students. It was exhausting, frustrating, confusing… I couldn’t believe that climate change was disappearing from the internet.

If it was only this easy to make climate change disappear. Whether we erase the words on paper or from the internet, climate change is real. Climate science needs to be taught, we need people to work on solutions, and this can only happen if we have access to information.

Fortunately, the words and the data came back online. My teaching and learning resources were restored! But now… will this happen again? Will climate change be erased from the websites of our federal agencies? And what research will continue, or be halted, in the area of climate science?

For this quilt, I decided to have the quilt look like a sheet of notebook paper, using blue ribbon stitched on white fabric to represent lined paper. I used red on the left-side edge for the binding, just as one would see a red line next to three holes pre-punched in the paper. The words “climate change” should be viewed as if they were originally in black, but the grey letters represent the words being erased by the pencil. For the back of the quilt, I used a fabric with crabs on it, as it is just one example of one of the stories I follow closely – the impact of climate change on the populations of red king crabs and snow crabs in Alaskan waters (see this NOAA article – if the article hasn’t been deleted, that is).

The quilt measures 36 inches wide by 36 inches tall and completed January 5, 2025. All of the fabric for this quilt was purchased at The Crabby Quilter in Annapolis, Maryland.