Knitting the Daily Temperatures: January 2019

Sometime in December I started noticing knitted and crocheted scarves and blankets worked according to the daily temperatures in a year. A colour scale is developed and every day a row or two are worked in the colour related to that day's high temperature. One of the most notable is the The Tempestry Project, "visualizing climate data in a way that is accurate, personal, tangible, and beautiful." While intrigued, particularly with the underlying purpose to demonstrate climate change, I chose not to participate in this particular project mainly because of having to purchase yarn. (I have an enormous stash and my ulterior motive is to make a dent in it!) The Tempestry scarves are worked using the same yarn and the same scale so that they can be compared at some point. There are people using historical weather data and knitting several scarves so as to create a very tangible comparison.

I also decided that to make a serious impact on my stash I would make a blanket of mitred modules, approximately 3" square. After playing around with some sketches on graph paper, I settled on an arrangement like a calendar.

This will eventually create a blanket about 54" x 63", probably more with a border.

Selection of yarns from my stash

Temperature scale and the module for January 1st.

January 1 and 2

First week of January

 And the rest of the month, extraordinarily mild, hence all the green (1-5 degrees C) and yellow-green (6-10 C) with a little blue-green (-4 to 0 C).

The month of January

I was quite excited late last week to see the extended forecast called for high temps of -14 C. Yay! I would get to use blues (-9 to -5 C) and blue-violet (-14 to -10 C). Here is an image of the work so far which includes the first five days of February.

These past three days have been our coldest yet this year.