Crocheting a temperature blanket - part 2

Hello and welcome back! It's hard to believe, but this is my 100th post! I think it's fitting that it is not a stamping-related post, but a personal one. You may remember that back in January, I posted about a blanket I was creating for my son and daughter-in-law for their first anniversary. (You can find that post HERE.) Anyway, their anniversary has come and gone, but I have finally finished the blanket! 

It turned out a bit bigger than I expected - I guess I crochet too loosely - but the blanket is more than 6 feet square! Lots of room for them to cuddle up under it when the weather turns cooler. But I couldn't get a picture of the whole thing together, so here are two pictures so you can see all the colors.

As you can see, it stretches a little more than end to end on this twin bed, and folded in half, covers it side to side as well.

I tried scrunching it up to get the whole thing in, but it didn't work very well! You can see the top corner where the blanket was started, then worked in diagonal rows to the bottom.

Here is the final corner with the red sparkly yarn for their anniversary. I also added this yarn for Christmas and Valentine's Day.

I had originally planned to edge the blanket with either white or off white, but since I had so much of the royal blue left over, I decided to use that instead.

I'm shipping it off to them tomorrow, and enclosing the two cards below to show them how the colors work.

The first is the color chart with samples of the yarn used, and the second is the temperature chart I used to determine the colors. I also wrote them a note on the back to explain it.

I don't think they'll be able to use it for a while, but I hope they like it!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great day!

--Cindi

Crocheting a temperature blanket

Hello and welcome back! Today's post is not stamping related, but I've been talking to some friends about it recently and thought this was an easy way to explain my latest craft project, as if I needed another one! :)

Social media, particularly Facebook and Pinterest, are great for providing lots of ideas for new projects. This one, for a temperature blanket, came from a bullet journaling group on Facebook. When I searched it on Pinterest, lots of ideas came up, but there were a couple that I decided to use when creating my blanket.

Before I show you my project, let me explain a little about what a temperature blanket is. It's not an electric blanket. :) It's an afghan that you create in rows or squares and the color of the elements is determined by the air temperature (high, low or average) on the days of the period you are making the blanket for. I originally planned to make a blanket for myself for 2017, but then decided to make one as a first anniversary gift for my son and daughter-in-law. They married on June 5, 2016 and live in Washington, just outside of Seattle. I used the Weather Underground website to look up historical weather data, and I'm using the high temperature for each day. 

Here are a couple of photographs of the blanket so far. Notice the photobombing cat! :)

I'm using a pattern from the Red Heart website for a Corner to Corner Throw.  The Crochet Crowd has a great video tutorial on YouTube that shows how to create this blanket. This pattern is crocheted in "squares" so the tricky part is calculating how many "squares" to crochet for each day. I used an Excel spreadsheet to help me with the math (geeky, I know!) and calculated that I need about 25 squares for each day. Sadly, the numbers don't come out even, so somewhere along the line I'll have to figure out what to do about the extra squares I need. Maybe I'll add additional squares for a couple of holidays with some sparkly or unusual yarn. I only need about 3 days worth, so it shouldn't be too bad. 

The actual temperatures are just recorded on a piece of graph paper so that I can cross off each day as I finish it.

My color chart is written on there too, to help me remember, but just in case you can't read it, I'll add it here. All yarn is Red Heart Super Saver and all temps are Fahrenheit.

91 and above     Cherry Red
86 - 90                Light Raspberry
81 - 85                 Pumpkin
76 - 80                 Carrot
71 - 75                  Gold
66 - 70                 Bright Yellow
61 - 65                 Cornmeal
56 - 60                Tea Leaf
51 - 55                 Paddy Green
46 - 50                Real Teal
41 - 45                 Pale Plum
36 - 40                Medium Purple
35 and below     Royal

As you can see in the photos above, the blanket starts in the summer. A lot of temps were in the Gold range, so I've already had to purchase another skein of that color. I'll probably be needing another Bright Yellow and Cornmeal as well. I wish I had thought about my colors a bit more before I started because the yellows and golds are not my favorites. I would have rather had more greens and blues. Oh well, there's always next year! I'm waiting until it's finished to decide whether to do the edging in white or off white.  

I've only been working on it for a few days and I've already gotten through the first three months. I'm hoping to get it caught up to the current day; then I'll only need to crochet each day as it comes. 

I hope this encourages you to give this type of project a try. There are lots of ideas out there, especially on Pinterest, so have fun with it!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great day! 

--Cindi