I’m working on a project that will take all year to finish. The big crafting trend this year is Weather Blankets (or scarves if you don’t want to go too big). What’s a Weather Blanket?
First, choose a craft; knitting, crocheting, and quilting are all popular choices. Next, decide on a pattern that allows 366 pieces (because it’s Leap Year), you may have some blanks if you’re going with squares. Each line or square in your design represents a day of the year, but that’s just the beginning. Now you have to decide on a color scheme where each 10 degrees of temperature is represented by a different color of yarn. Some people decide to do a single row of color for the high temperature each day, but if you’re working with squares, you can add even more detail.

My blanket accounts for the high and low temperatures, the length of day and night, and any kind of precipitation that happened on that day. I chose to crochet granny squares for my blanket, 18 squares wide and 21 squares long. This totals 378 squares, and I only need 366 for the days in the year, so the remaining 12 squares will cover the corners of the design. This is my very first attempt at crocheting ever, so granny squares seemed like the safest place to practice. I’ve knitted before, but nothing really complicated, and I really wanted to learn to crochet.

I’ve been working in pixels on Paint to keep track of my plan and colors. Since I didn’t start until late Janaury, I’m still catching up and the tiny image helps me look ahead at current conditions. Texas weather has been all over the scale this winter, so I have to have every color from my 20s to my 80s ready.

80s – golden orange
70s – yellow
60s – light green
50s – tropical green
40s – cyan
30s – blue
20s – purple

My 90s will be a tangerine and my 100s will be crimson. I anticipate needing mostly 90s for my area. It’s been very warm this year, so I may not need to dip into the teens and single digits until the end of the year. What has been most surprising is the lack of rain. I bought a grey, homespun yarn from Lion Brand to make little tufts on the days when it rained, but until this weekend that was just one day.

Each of the squares is four rounds with the inner rounds being the low/night temperature, and the outer rounds being the high/day temperature. You can see that the number of rounds in each changes a couple times. The black dots represent the solstices and equinoxes. Rather than beginning my 2/2 on the equinox when day and night are equal, I’ve centered the changes around those markers. Likewise with the longest days (1/3) and nights (3/1).

It took me almost a month to decide on the color for my blank corners, but I decided I wanted to use more purples in the corners. The ends of the blanket are both cooler winter temperatures, so I picked “Grape Fizz” as my corner color. I will bind all the squares together and do the border probably in black. With borders, the blanket should measure around 6′ x 7′. Wish me luck!

Are you working on a project this year? It’s not too late to start a Weather Blanket. You can always catch up with the observed conditions for the days you missed.