A temperature blanket is something that I had been wanting to attempt for quite some time. For those of you that don’t know, the idea is that you start on January 1st and crochet one row per day in a specific color according to the daily high temperature. Sounds great, right? Well, in reality, I’m always too exhausted from New Year’s Eve shenanigans to remember that I wanted to start a new project on January 1st. This year, I was determined not to let that stop me, and I decided to start on whatever date I wanted and just go back to look up historical data instead. I could go back one month, or I could go back 50+ years. Which is exactly what I chose to do!
For my temperature blanket, I decided to make a special gift for my mom. I went to https://www.wunderground.com/history and entered the zip code that she was born in and the date. (You can search records as far back as 1945.) From there, I selected the “Custom” tab and entered the entire year from January 1, 1961 to December 31, 1961. (Sorry Mom, for outing your age.) Scroll down to the bottom, and you will see High, Average, and Low for each individual day that year under “Weather History and Observations”. I chose to use the High temperature for each day, but you can choose whichever option floats your boat. You’ll also want to note that the temperatures shown are in Celsius. Since I currently live in Africa, I’m used to temperatures being reported in Celsius; however, my mom lives in America so I assumed she’d be grateful to have the temps converted to Fahrenheit. If you’re a math nerd like me, you might find it as fun as I did to plug all of the Celsius numbers into Excel and use a formula (F=C*1.8+32) to change them all to Fahrenheit.
Once you have your temperature data, or if you are crocheting along from January 1st, you need to determine your temperature ranges and assign colors to them. Determining your ranges can be as easy as 0-10=purple, 11-20=blue, 21-30=green, and so on. If you want to add more variety of colors, or you live someplace where the temperatures don’t fluctuate much, you can break it down even further to 5 degree intervals. Assigning colors was the hardest part of the entire blanket for me. I must admit, I am a very indecisive person. I have a tendency to overthink color choices, and change them over and over again, often restarting pieces even if I’m halfway done. My husband just silently shakes his head every time he sees me unraveling 20+ hours of work only to start again. Anyway, here’s what I ultimately ended up with, including links to order directly from Amazon to make your life easier:
0-9.9 White
10-19.9 Grey Heather
20-29.9 Amethyst
30-39.9 Royal
40-49.9 Turqua
50-59.9 Spring Green
60-69.9 Lemon
70-79.9 Coral
80-89.9 Cherry Red
90-99.9 Burgundy
Obviously, you’ll want to adjust this a bit if you have temperatures below 0 or 100+. If you couldn’t tell from the color names, I chose to use Red Heart Super Saver yarn for this project. It isn’t necessarily the softest yarn, but in my opinion, it has the greatest variety of color choices. Plus, I know a secret to make it just as soft as any other luxury yarn (but that’s another post for another day). I estimated that each skein of yarn would yield about 14 rows. So, for example, if you have 60 days with temperatures between 80-89.9 you’ll need 5 skeins of Cherry Red.
I will warn you now, this blanket will be incredibly large. I’ve seen other websites saying to use half-double crochet stitches or even double-crochet, but I went with single crochet stitches and it was still much larger than anticipated. This isn’t going to be a blanket to throw on the back of the couch, more of a queen-size bed cover, so plan your width accordingly or you’ll end up with a super long, skinny, awkward-looking blanket. I chose a width of 175 stitches.
I also chose to leave tassels at each end of my blanket. It was much easier to just leave 3-4 inches at the end of each row and tie it off than to try to switch colors seamlessly every row, but that option is totally up to you as the creator.
One last special touch that I added to my blanket was a special row to signify my mom’s actual birth date. On this day only, I chose to do the entire row in double-crochet so that it could easily be picked out amongst the rest. Some people like to do this on every major holiday, or maybe change the stitch type every time it snows, or some other thing that is significant to them. Just keep in mind that anything larger than a single-crochet stitch is going to increase the length of your already long blanket.
Already finished a temperature blanket of your own? Page-hopping to Amazon right now to order your yarn? Either way, I’d love to see photos of your finished products and compare our temperatures from around the world!