Thursday, May 3, 2018

Temperature Blankets and scarves

Have you been bitten by this bug?  What is this phenomena?  Temperature blankets!  What is it exactly?  Well that depends.  A very loose and quick explanation is pick a year, easy would be to pick the current year and for the high temperature every day knit or crochet a row in a specific color to correspond.

So many have so many questions about this.  Do I have to do a blanket?  No, You can choose to do a scarf, a skirt or a series of lap robes (one month or two months per robe) for just a few ideas.  If choosing an article of clothing, It might be wise to choose fingering weight yarns and fine hooks or needles even if you are only doing 6 months.  A full year is 365 days or 365 rows, unless it's a leap year then 366.  But let's all admit that's a lot of rows.  

First choice to make, what are you making?  A blanket?  Great.  What stitch choices do you have?  To keep things from growing to house cozy size, garter stitch/stockinette stitch or single crochet/moss stitch.  You could even choose to do a granny square of one round  or two rounds.

Let's discuss what year to do.  The current year ensures that you only do a row or two a day.  But maybe you want to commemorate a special year.  How about the year you were born?  The year you were married?  The year you received your degree?  What special year do you want to remember?  What about a year with really peculiar weather?  Those with children and/or grandchildren may want to create a blanket for the year they were born or   The choice is wide open.  NOAA has weather for the last 30 - 40 years.  You can google for the websites that will tell you the temperature.  Pick the site that meets your needs.  Don't forget to plug in location.  That will have an effect.

Now let's choose colors.  How do you want to divide up the temperatures?  hmmm.......how big of a range do you have to work with?  How many colors do you want to work with?  As an example, I want to work with 14 colors.  I want to do both high and low temperatures.  My range is from 0 to 104.  I will choose 7 colors, one dark and one light.  My high temperature is the light and my low is the dark. You never know when the high and low temps of the day won't change.  If I divide my 104 by 7, my divisions are as follows:



0 – 15

16 - 30

31 – 45

46 – 60

61 – 75

76 – 90

91 - 104



For yarn choice, I'm thinking of a sport weight superwash wool.  But that might not be readily available.  What is readily available is worsted weight in acrylic.  There are hundreds of hues spanning the rainbow.  I also want to have snowfalls and rain days marked.  For those days of precipitation, I'll use white eyelash yarn and grey eyelash yarns.  I'll hold these double with the color for the temperatures.  For days with no precipitation, I'll just use the color single.  Days of phenomenal downpour will get double white (blizzards) or dark grey or black (hurricanes), blue eyelash for wind storms.......  Of course this assumes I can find the colors and weights I'm planning.

My pattern?  As noted above, I have a few obvious choices and a few not so obvious.  I could utilize Apache Tears, or ripple stitches in single crochet half doubles or pineapple stitch.  There are many short stitches that can be used.  What about changing stitch pattern every month??  I'm thinking of utilizing a two round granny square.  High temperature in the center and low temperature around it.  One "square" for each day.  For days that don't exist in the 6 x 6 grid, I'll crochet or knit a patch that has the month name worked in white with black lettering.  For the special day of the year???  Gold or silver eyelash yarn or sequin yarn!!  No special day?  No need to find the fancy stuff.

How wide will it be?  For a scarf, I would choose 4 to 12 inches.  For an afghan, I will start with 48 inches.  But if I want the afghan to cover a bed, I'll take the top measurement from a chart of the most common sizes (you can find one here).  A different take on it would be to go 180 stitches if you are doing a 6 month afghan, 365 stitches for a whole year......

You are the boss of your work.  You make the choices!

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