At the beginning of the year, ysabetwordsmith posted a bunch of ideas for projects and goals and such, and one of those projects was a temperature blanket. For those not familiar with what that is (it's okay, I wasn't either when I first saw it), it is a blanket made to keep track of the daily temperature. You can use a few colours or lots of colours, depending on how big you want each range of temperatures to be; if you go by 5 degree Fahrenheit increments, you will need more colours than if you go by 10 or 15 degrees per range. All of the blankets I saw were for the entire year, and either knit of crocheted one row for every day.

Doing a whole year seemed like a heck of a lot of work to me, and would have been a bunch of different colours, since my area can go from about -10 degrees Celsius all the way up to about 35 or 36 degrees Celsius in the course of a year (about 15 degrees Fahrenheit to about 95 degrees Fahrenheit). And on top of all the new goals I was trying to establish and maintain in January, starting such a big project wasn't feasible. Instead, I decided I would do a summer blanket, for the months of June, July, and August. That gave me time to settle in to my other goals, time to plan the project, a shorter amount of time to make the project, and a smaller range of colours I needed to buy. I also decided to crochet squares instead of rows, since I find that a little easier, and it makes the colour changes much easier.

I still wanted a decent size blanket, because I am usually cold enough to need them, so I went with six inch squares. The size is also because of the two patterns I chose to use, one has a set number of rounds and ends up being about six inches big. With 92 days (ugh) in three months, I am going to do a blanket that is 9x10 squares, and use the last two days to do a border around the edge of the blanket. This should give me a blanket that is roughly 54x60 inches, which is a good size for something like a couch blanket. I will put my pattern and all other blanket information under a cut, so that anyone could make a blanket like mine, if they wanted. I'll do my best to make it logical and coherent, but I don't have much experience with writing out patterns, so if it needs revision or clarification let me know and I'll do my best to fix it.

( Temperature Blanket Instructions )

I'm currently working on one of my fancy squares and am taking pictures of each round. The next square is going to be a plain one, so I will take step by step pictures of that one as well, and then post them in a separate post, for any visual thinkers out there.

Let me know what you think, and I'll try to post progress pictures as I go!

ETA: I'm getting all of my temperatures from https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/canada/windsor/historic I typically check them at night, or the following day, just to be sure I don't miss a higher temperature, or some unexpected rain. Whether it's the most accurate site or not, I don't know, but it does seem to be within a degree or two at least.