Hello crafters!

I’m sure you have all heard of the historical crochet ‘temperature blanket’. If you haven’t let me fill you in! The temperature blanket is a project that you work on over the course of the year with each row of the blanket representing a day of the year. The daily temperature corresponds to a certain colour of yarn that you will use for that day’s row. You end up with a 365 row blanket with a beautiful array of colours personalized to your location and year!

The temperature blanket is a pretty lengthy project so this post will be part one of two. In this post I will cover:

• Yarn selection
• Creating a temperature chart (including a free downloadable chart from me 🙂 )
• Recording your temperatures
• Starting your blanket

Let’s get to it!

Yarn Selection

If you search Pinterest for temperature blanket colours plenty of awesome colour combinations will come up. You can go with a classic rainbow selection, a certain colour in a variety of shades or colours that are complimentary like red, orange and yellow for example.

If you are like me and you are always looking for a new reason to visit the yarn store then simply go to store and pick out a yarn that you like that comes in a variety of shades. Just keep in mind that to follow along with this tutorial you will need 11 colours.

I chose Loops and Threads Impeccable yarn because it is easy to work with, it comes in bright solid shades in beautiful colours, it works with a 5mm hook and best of all it’s fairly cheap!

These are the colours that I selected :

Temperature Chart

Before you start recording your temperatures you need to find a trusty site where you can look up your daily temperatures. I used the Canadian Government Daily Data Report but if you don’t live in Canada I’m sure you can google ‘daily data report’ for your area. I used the average daily temperature but you could also use the daily high or daily low temperature.

Next you need to assign each of your yarn colours to a range of temperatures. Here is the Impeccable yarn colour assignment that I used:

• -20°c or below : lavender
• -19°c to -15°c : amethyst
• -14°c to -10°c : teal
• -9°c to -5°c : aqua
• -4°c to 0°c : deep forest
• 1°c to 5°c : forest
• 6°c to 10°c : butterscotch
• 11°c to 15°c : pumpkin
• 16°c to 20°c : rich orchid
• 21°c to 25°c : rouge
• 25°c or above : claret

Now that you have assigned your colours you have a few options. You could just reference your list like the one above and write out the colours for each day by hand but I am a bit of an organization nerd and I made a spreadsheet where I can just plug in the daily temperatures and the spreadsheet automatically displays the colour for that day.

Here is a little snapshot of the chart:

Once you have filled in all of the daily temperatures you can simply print off your spreadsheet and highlight each day as you complete that row.

I have a blank version of that spreadsheet for download on my members page. The members page is accessible for all of my subscribers so simply subscribe to my free monthly newsletter to gain access!

Starting Your Blanket

Now that you have your colours and temperatures all organized it’s time to finally start your blanket!

I used a 5mm hook and obviously the yarn selection shown above.

I couldn’t resist my favourite stitch for this project, the moss stitch. I think the moss stitch is extremely effective when using multiple colours because each row kind of nestles into the previous row really making your colours pop.

I used moss stitch a while back in my 3 easy dishcloths post so you can head over there to get the details on how to work that stitch! *Bonus* it only uses single crochet and chain stitch.

Alternatively you could use any stitch you want so get creative 🙂

I decided to start with a chain of 300 stitches in the hopes that my blanket will be somewhat square.

*Update since finishing my blanket* 300 chain stitches were not enough to make a square blanket. The completed blanket is rectangular but still quite cozy! If you want more of a square you will probably need to start with 375-400 stitches. Keep in mind though that this will make for one huge blanket! (queen bed sized!)

When you are switching colours as frequently as you will be in this project don’t forget to weave in your ends as you go because it will be a real downer if you have to weave them all in at the end. Just take the tail from the previous row and hold it along the back of your work for the first 5-10 stitches and then snip the excess tail!

That’s all you need to know to get started on your temperature blanket 🙂 I have only a few rows completed so far but I’m super excited to see the end result so I will probably be done soon heehee!

When you are ready, head over to Temperature Blanket Part Two where I will show you how to finish off your blanket!

Happy crafting!