My Version of a Temperature Blanket

Maybe you have never heard of a Temperature Blanket. If you knit or crochet then it’s more likely that you have. They seem to be the rage or maybe it’s just that I have become obsessed now so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. The idea is that you record the daily temperature using color in a knitted or crocheted piece. Coming at it from another direction, the temps provide a pattern with which to create a unique or personalized piece. Often people use this as an interesting way to create their project over the period of a year.

I don’t know if this is the origin of the idea but there is a Tempestry Project website. They state: “One of the ongoing problems inherent in discussions about climate change is the vast scale of the conversation. The Tempestry Project’s goal is to scale this down into something that is accurate, tangible, relatable, and beautiful. Tempestry Project blends fiber art with temperature data to create a bridge between global climate and our own personal experiences through knitted or crocheted temperature tapestries, or “Tempestries.” Each Tempestry represents the daily high temperature for a given year and location, January at the bottom and December at the top (think bar graphs!)”

My interest in this began when a customer came to buy yarn for her own blanket. I had just started carrying the new Ashford DK yarn and she thought that would be just right. It comes in great colors and is very affordable. Then I remembered that a friend had knitted a pair of Tempestry Banners to be donated to her favorite National Park for an exhibit about climate. My friend, Lisa, provided these photos:

These banners are knitted using colors that represent the high temperatures for each day of 1916 and 2016. Beads along the right side indicate precipitation.

But wait! I’m a weaver. I want to weave a temperature blanket. There are a lot of factors to consider and it starts to get complicated. Here are some of the things I have thought about with ideas explained below.

1. It’s one thing to knit or crochet a row each day for a year and keep the project in a bag. To weave a row each day that means that the loom is tied up on that one project for a whole year.

2. Color range. Assign a color for every 5 degrees? Every 10 degrees?

3. So far everything I’ve seen uses high temperatures. What about the lows? Aren’t they important too, not only for the discussion of climate change, but even if the intent is to lend an overall feel of how we experienced the year.

4. Use temperatures for where you live? If you travel, use temperatures of where you happened to be each day? Or use temperatures of the year of someone’s birth or marriage or?

5. What yarn?

I’ll give you the answers to some of these later. But first let me explain my thought process. I knew it wasn’t practical to tie up a loom for a whole year but I could do a project that covered a whole year. So for the first blanket I’d weave 2020 temperatures. I explored sources of temperature data made a chart.

I was already December 20 so I’ll have to look up numbers if I want to complete the chart for 2020. I made a similar chart for the lows. A knitted blanket starts at one edge (January 1 temperature) and works forward for 365 rows. With weaving I could use two sets of numbers because I am working with warp and weft. What if the warp was one set of numbers (low temps) and the weft was the highs? There are some issues with number of threads as it relates to the scale of the project and the size of the loom, but I’m still working on that. I wanted to move on to color.

I got out my colored pencils and assigned colors to temperature ranges of 5 degrees. That is 15 colors! Is that realistic? Maybe not for a couple of reasons. But I forged ahead. I photocopied the charts of highs and lows so that I could try out the colors.

This is not how the blanket would look because these months are shown with the days in columns. A woven project would be made with each of those days indicating one thread, either in warp or weft.

This is the chart with the lows for each day. Quite different! Next I thought about yarn. I had already decided that the new Ashford DK yarn would be perfect for this. I know that part of my business is in promoting our own locally grown fiber, and I do love the wool yarn that I am having spun by three U.S. mills (2 in California). But I don’t feel bad promoting this yarn—it is “locally produced” in New Zealand from sustainable New Zealand sheep farms and I think Ashford is a reputable company to support…and the yarn is very affordable and easy to use with a lot of color choices. It compliments my own Timm Ranch yarn very well. Here is the link to this yarn.

This is 12 of the colors that I chose for my initial sampling. I wanted three additional colors but they are backordered and will be here in a few weeks.

I wound a warp for some samples. I didn’t use a particular color order or specific number of threads. I wanted to see how the cloth would look if some of the stripes were as few as 2 threads (one day because it’s easier to wind warp in pairs) and some up to an inch. I used the same color order in the weft for two of the samples and I used two different weave structures.

Here is how the sample looks when woven in broken twill.

This weave structure alternates plain weave and twill picks and looks different on each side.

These samples are based on the assumption that there will be color changes in warp and weft. What about setting up an easier project where one direction uses a solid color?

This is the same warp woven in broken twill with black or white.

This sample uses that plain weave/twill pattern but with the solid black weft.

So there is a lot to think about in planning this woven project.

1. Color changes in warp and weft. Too much going on? Will be more interesting if the lows are one direction and the highs are the other. A fun project to plan and weave.

2. Color changes in warp with solid weft. All the planning and paying attention is for the warp. Easy to weave.

3. Solid warp with color changes in weft. Easy to wind warp. Not as easy to weave with color changes. Stopping and starting yarn. Fulling these samples prevented loose ends from being a problem.

4. Use fewer colors? I tried the same chart using 10 degree increments for color changes. That requires only 8 colors.

The highs in 10 degree color change increments.

The chart of lows in 10 degree color increments is above.

One reason for writing this blog post is to get all my thoughts in one place. Another is to generate some interest in this project (and maybe sell some yarn to be honest). Who wants to work on a color blanket or scarf or wall hanging? You don’t have to weave it. I’ll happily show my yarn to knitters and crocheters too. Here is one more idea for those who might want to do a little each day.

This yarn works great with the Schacht Zoom Loom and you can weave a square in 15 minutes. I am going to weave all the 2020 colors and put the blanket together as an example. Hmmm. 365 days x 15 minutes = 91.25 hours. Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to finish this one.

Look for future posts about the progress of this idea.