How to Make a Temperature Blanket

My baby pillow

My Great Grandma

When I was a young girl around ten years old, my great grandmother introduced me to the world of crocheting. Before this time, I saw her making blankets for members of my family and I always had a blanket that had been hand made by her on my bed. I actually have a pillow she made for me as an infant that I still sleep with. Until that day, I always thought crocheting and knitting were something only older people did. I never thought I could learn to make things. One day while she was visiting, she decided it was time I learned how to crochet. My great grandmother started me off with the very first stitch you make when starting a blanket, the chain stitch. I loved it, and would go through skeins of yarn making a giant chain stitch! My friend next door started working on making chains too, and we thought we could be in The Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s longest chain stitch. That idea ended by the time school started, but my love of crocheting never did. After a while she taught me a second stitch, the single crochet. I put my crochet needles away for a very long time until I met my husband. My husband’s mother was a huge crocheter and was always making blankets for various people. This rekindled my interest, and I picked up my crochet needles once again.

Here are a few projects I have made over the years that show the variety of things you can make.

The first blanket I made: Rose Pillow Bookmarks

Over the years I have made many blankets and pillows as seen above, learning new and more complex stitches, but the item that I find the most interesting is my Temperature Blanket.

What is a Temperature Blanket? A temperature blanket is a crochet record for a set amount of time using predetermined colors for the temperature variances.

Before you begin your blanket there are a few decisions that need to be made.

How often you will record the temperature (daily or weekly average)
What temperature to use (high, low, or average for the day)
Color ranges
Stitches used
Hook size

1. Recording time

You need to choose how often you will record the temperature. I chose to make one row for every day of 2019. This means in the end my blanket would have 365 rows, plus a border around the entire blanket. Each day, I would look up the high and low temperatures for the day, calculate the average, and compare it to my color chart. If I did not have time to crochet the row, I would write the average temperature and corresponding color on a calendar and refer to it later. This way, I didn’t have to crochet the row that day; I could save up a week’s worth and crochet all at once. But a word of warning is - don’t let it go too long between crocheting rows. With the constant temperature/color changes, it could become an overwhelming task. I decided that I would gather the information and crochet once a week. For me this worked well, and didn’t feel so daunting. If 365 rows seems like too much, you can use the average temperature of the week and crochet that color. This will give you a much smaller blanket of only 52 rows plus a border.

2. Temperature

You will need to decide if you want to record the high, low or average temperature of the day. You want to use the same one every day. There are a few things to think about before starting your blanket. What is the weather like where you live? Does it get really hot on July days and really cold during January nights? I chose to use the average temperature because I wanted to record the high temperatures of summer as well as the cold temperature of winter.

3. Color Range

You need to decide what temperature ranges and which corresponding colors you are planning to use. I chose to use eight colors to give me more of a rainbow look. The temperature and yarn color ranges I used were:

   89° & above hot pink
   78°-88° raspberry
   67°-77° orange
   56°-66° yellow
   45°-55° lime green
   34°-44° aqua blue
   23°-33° dark navy blue
   32°& below purple

If you want more colors you can break the temperature ranges down even more. For me this was enough of a breakdown.

You can see how hot it was that summer. There are 3 rows of hot pink showing that the average temperature was over 89°. This was July 2019.

You can see how cold it was that winter. There are 3 rows of purple showing that the average temperature was below 32°. This was January 2019.

4. Stitches

For stitches used, this is completely up to you. I originally chained 100 stitches to start the blanket then used a single crochet throughout the entire blanket. I chose this stitch because I knew the blanket would be large and didn’t want to add to the bulk by using a larger stitch.

5. Hook Size

I used a J sized hook, but again, this is up to you. If you want larger stitches, use a bigger needle; if you want smaller stitches, use a smaller needle.

The key is to have fun with it. If you do not have the time or the room to make a blanket, you can always make a temperature scarf to remember the year with.

Here is a scarf based on one woman and her daily train commute. She recorded if the train was on time or late (white - on time, blue - up to 15 minutes late, and red - over 15 minutes late). For her, this was just another fun way to help pass the time while commuting. Click here to read all about it.