On The Needles: Temperature Blanket

 Many (many, many) years ago, I made my husband a temperature scarf.

The idea is that you assign each temperature, or range of temperatures, a colour, then record the daily temperature using those colours. I used the historical temperatures for the year we got married and the resulting scarf was about 9 feet long (and thus totally unwearable)!

The scarf I knitted my husband.

Since then, I've seen people using other crafts to record the temperatures through a year or other period of time and I've wanted to revisit the temperature thing in some way. This was helped along by online algorithms last year. Suddenly my feeds were full of crochet temperature blankets and articles about pregnancy blankets (which recorded the person's mood through the duration of the pregnancy).

My other inspiration was the fact that my mum has crocheted each of my children the most beautiful and cosy blankets. When they're feeling under the weather, it's their Naini blankets they choose to snuggle under. As they grow older, they're maybe not quite so inclined to come to me for a hug or a snuggle as they used to, but I know you can get a lot t of comfort simply by wrapping yourself in something made by someone who loves you. 

And they grow out of jumpers so quickly; a blanket is the natural choice for a portable cuddle.

My kids are all IVF babies. Our fun family fact is that they were all conceived on the same day, in the same 'batch' of embryos, and then spent getting lengths of time in the freezer before being thawed and transferred.

When I gave my son the option of a blanket of his first year of life or something different, he asked for one which tracked the time from his embryo transfer until the day he was born. I loved this idea and set straight to work planning out colour schemes for it. 

Can't help but think these colours remind me of macaroni cheese!

His favourite colours are greens, reds, and blues, but he surprised me by opting for rainbow shades; possibly because that was the colour scheme I'd gone for in his dad's temperature scarf. And just like his dad's blanket, we're using black at either end and to mark the divisions between months. I'm planning to use an applied i-cord border up the sides when I'm done too (but I'm trying not to think about that too much right now).

Next up was the massive hunt for a blanket pattern to use. My first thought was something basic, like garter stitch, but I still spent about two weeks scouring Ravelry for alternative ideas. Naturally, in the end, I went with a nice simple garter stitch blanket! 

Of course, what this did mean was that I was totally overloaded with inspiration and promptly made plans for another three blankets (more on one of those in another post).

I'm currently about two 'months' through the blanket, with about five and a bit still to go. Each row is 300 stitches and I work two per day, so while it's easy and mindless knitting, it takes about an hour to knit three rows. It's also proving to be quite a warm knit; great to keep your lap warm when you're in a cold room, not so great when the fire is going and the room is already toasty!

Expect to hear more about this one in the coming months.

Progress so far!