Archives for February 2016

I tried out quite a few patterns before I settled on the pattern that I liked the most for my temperature blanket…it needed to be a pattern that I would still like doing a year from now! Also, I wanted to pick a pattern that would be easy to add my decorative blocks too.

I chose the following pattern from spincushions.com – Squaring The Circle

Each block is a colored circle with a white edging that squares the block.  The color of the inner circle represents the HIGH temperature for each day of 2016!  I used Caron Simply Soft Yarn and a size H hook.  Each block is 4 1/4 by 4 1/4 inches.

I chose a snowflake pattern to be the block that represented January.  I found the pattern online and posted as a PDF

I used a size 2 sparkly silver yarn with a size F hook to acheive the size of snowflake that I wanted.  The block for the month will be placed at the begining of the month before any temperature blocks are placed.  I made the square block with all white yarn and made the snowflake seperately.  I am using Coats brand transparent thread to sew all of the holiday designs on to the blocks.

For the New Years Day holiday, I chose to represent that block with the #1.  I found a great video tutorial on youtube  – Tutorial for #1

With my January (snowflake) block done and my New Years Day (#1) block done, I then crocheted the first 7 blocks with their coordinating temperatures!

I am LOVING how it is starting out! As you can see in this picture the #1 is differnt.  This was the first #1 that I did, and I didn’t like how it looked, so I took it off and crocheted the pink #1!

I first heard about Temperature Blankets on December 30th of 2015.  At first I thought it was a crazy idea but then I was intrigued. So, I joined a group on FaceBook and got started planning my own Temperature Blanket.  My color choices have gone through quite a few iterations but I am finally satisfied with the colors I have and I believe they will give a good representation of the temperatures that we have here in South East Washington!  Because we live in the desert, our temperatures range from the negatives to well over 100 deg. each year!

I am using Caron Simply Soft yarn to crochet by blanket and I have decided to make squares and join them.  I decided this for 2 reasons…I felt I could better control the size of my blanket by planning my squares out ahead of time and it will only take me 15 mintues a day to make and join each square instead of doing a long stripe each day. Also, I rarely make blankets that I have to join so I thought this would give me some good practice throughout the year!

So, I started by planning my color choices and these are what I ended up with:

Temp Blanket Color Chart

*I found this cute basket to hold all of my yarn!

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For my yarn that denotes our cooler temperatures, I placed the yarn in a dark to light gradiation (for grey, purples and blues) then when we get to the colors that denote our warmer temperatures, I laid the colors out in a light to dark gradiation (greens, pinks, yellows, oranges and reds).  By doing it this way, I believe the colors better represent the true temperatures that they portray.

The next stage of my planning was figuring out how I wanted my blanket squares to be laid out.   You can see how I chose to lay my blanket out by clicking the link below.  I will have 416 squares when my blanket is complete.  I chose to do one square for each day of the year, 1 square to denote the begining of each month, one square for each of our families birthdays and I included a square for quite a few of our holidays.

Temperature Blanket Template

I am tracking the weather at www.acuweather.com and I am recording it in an Excel spreadsheet that I created.