Halfway through crocheted temperature blanket

I'm exactly half way through my 2016 crocheted temperature blanket. Here it is on my dining room table looking splendid, if I do say so myself.

January is far away at the fireplace end, June is closest to the camera.

So far it is 56 inches long which means it will be approximately 112 inches long at the end of the year making it long enough to generously cover a single bed. We don't actually have any single bed in our home but hope to by the end of the year.

At the moment, we don't have any guest facilities at our home, the only bed is our own double one though we have a sofa in MTM's study which converts into a Futon as an emergency measures and the sofa is always available at a pinch if we need to put anyone up.

One of the rooms I have earmarked for a spare bedroom with hopefully twin beds is planned to have major works on it very soon! Will our renovations never be finished?! We estimated it would take us two years when we moved in (three years ago) to do everything we wanted and it still feels like we have two years yet to do but we have found more to do as we got stuck in, family illnesses have taken up some of our time and also we've got a little more ambitious our plans as we've gone along but there's no reason to rush save it would be nice to finish and then sit back and enjoy it.

Other blog postings about progress earlier in the year on this blanket which details the pattern and colours of Stylecraft yarn that I'm using:

Meteorological colour clashes - 4 June 2016
Warming up on temperature blanket - 4 April 2016
Temperature blanket - 16 January 2016
Starting a temperature blanket - 6 January 2016

Here are individual month close ups of the temperature rows; top of the image is the 1st of the month going down to the end of the month (to within a day or two). Spring temperatures (and colours) arrived all in a rush in May in the UK!

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH 

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

I have plans to do a weather blanket next year which will incorporate more aspects of the weather like how sunny/rainy it is and wind speed ... am pondering how to do this at the moment and filtering my ideas - more on that soon! 

Finishing off WIPs and starting a temperature blanket

Inbetween Christmas and New Year, in that quiet little lull when the weather was rubbish except for one day, I managed to get quite a bit of crochet done. I spent the time concentrating on finishing off items that have been neglected, otherwise known as my WIPs.

The above picture is my finished Frank O'Randle's Rings of Change tablecloth being blocked. I told you a few weeks ago when it was still a Work In Progress how I modified earlier rounds to make it into a tablecloth. It was big enough when it got to row 78 so I finished it there and added two rows of my own custom border. It's been drying on towels under my dining room table for the last 3 days, I'm giving it another day just to be sure.

Two cushions for my antique Edwardian chaise longue. One in granny squares and the other a very simple bobble stitch which is just dcs and dtrs, I should do a closeup so you can see the texture of it but I'll probably write it up as a free pattern so I'll save the close up for then, 

I spotted the stitch on a Dutch Pinterest board, I had to work out what the UK equivalents were of words like afstand, herhalen and doorgaan. Google Translate only gets you so far when it comes to technical crochet stitches. It was actually quite a lot of fun; I'm thinking if I ever need to get a proper job again, I may retrain as a linguist!

I also completed a throw for one of my armchairs, It needs blocking before it can be photographed. With Rings of Change taking up all the available blocking space at the moment, I'll save that for another day. 

Haven't I been good?! Three finished WIPs means I'm allowed to start a new project. There has been talk in some of the crochet groups I follow on Facebook about temperature blankets. The traditional time to start one is 1 January. 

The original link I followed was made in Bernat yarns but I've never used it and I don't have any. I have so much yarn in my stash, I wondered if I had enough equivalent yarn in other brands to get going. I have plenty of Stylecraft Special DK; I found I was only one colour short which I bought this morning from the Wool Zone in Oakham. Here are my colours, from left to right:

Plum, Petrol, Turquoise, Aspen, Grass Green, Kelly Green, Gold Sunshine and Tomato. 

The pattern I'm using is Lucy of Attic24's Granny Stripes.

The idea is that you crochet one row a day, the colour of the row varies depending on the temperature so at the end of the year, you have a woolly record of how warm (or cold!) it's been!

So far, all six days (at around midday) have been either Turquoise(1 to 6 degrees C) or Aspen (7 to 12)... it will be exciting to change to another colour, apparently it'll be getting quite a bit colder next week so I may have to get the Petrol (-5 to zero) out! I'm wondering if it'll ever be cold enough this winter to use Plum (below -6)!

Stay warm x