N.B. woman knits intricate endangered sea turtles

This is my final egg pattern, about the size of a ping-pong ball, and they're like perfectly round and spherical. Knitforwildlife.org is the organization, so they think of knitting as like their Trojan horse for conservation. So what the organization does is they get around like five to six knitters per cohort. They do a couple cohorts a year, two cohorts a year, and they pick an endangered animal. And then the knitters get to learn all about the animal. We connect with scientists in the field. It's really incredible. And then our end of the bargain is that we come up with a pattern that will be free, open source, available on the internet. So knitters can download that pattern for free, they can knit the things, and then they can also learn about the animals that need our help and what they can do to help them. When I applied for the residency I wanted to make these educational tools and so I decided to do a pattern for a little hatchling but I wanted to make it like as close to accurate as I could within like the knitting medium. So I've been, the scientists have been great, Chris and Carla, I've been like emailing them back and forth like what's the measurement between like this joint and the front leg and this part and how wide is the flipper you know in the middle and at the end and the joint, and how wide is the neck. And they send me these like careful measurements back so I'm trying to create a little turtle that is as close as I can get it to real life. And then also eggs along with that. There is something I think really magical about their eggs and then they also have like kind of abnormal eggs as well so I'm also hoping to create some patterns for those. This is my Like most almost finished prototype. This is my best prototype. I've got to adjust the head a little bit. It's a little pointy there but there's little flippers and I've got to just change the shape of his back flippers but they're pretty close so just a little bit of tweaking and it was this I worked on a ton to get this shape of the shell because it's not just like it's highest really close to the head and then comes down. So that was really tricky to get the right curve of the shell. I spent most of my time working on this. I hope that people can download the pattern. They can knit the little hatchlings and the eggs. And I'm really hoping maybe a teacher can make a whole nest of eggs for their class. We're also developing curriculum that can go along with it. So lesson plans, ways for people to Engage with the material, but you know you can bring in this bag of like a little nest of 200 eggs and then say like out of these eggs this is how many that would actually survive or you know because of climate change beaches are getting washed out and so I think it really helps bring that sense of awe also as far as nature goes and then I hope that that really connects with people and then helps them to really care about conservation and making change doing something