Are you a planner? I’m 110% a planner. Sometimes I use all my time planning and not doing – that’s something I’m working on.

So I’ve been PLANNING this temperature blanket for my kids for a while now. I finally decided to jump in, but first I wanted to see how it would look. I just made a baby blanket last month and frogged the border about 73 times, and I really don’t want to frog all the color changes of this temp blanket!

First I wanted to decide if I would do a set number of pixels per day, or do an entire row of pixels per day.

I think if I was making this blanket for my household or for an adult, I would do a row per day. But in order to do that, obviously you need 365 rows. Using C2C you are kind of limited as to how big your blanket can be with a set amount of rows, and I think it would be way too big for a gift to my young children. Sure I’d love for them to keep it forever! But they will get the most use out of it in their childhood, so I think it needs to be a kid-sized project.

I actually mocked these up on my computer using Excel to see what they’d look like (to minimize frogging and general regret). I assigned a color fill to each temperature range to match the yarn I chose. I input the temperatures in degrees into each cell and it automatically color-filled in the right color. I did it this way in case I decided to change up my ranges – that way I just had to input the temps once and it would automatically adjust if I changed it up. ALSO, when I do my son’s blanket I can use it as a template. #winning. Or am I? It took a while. But I’m excited about the pattern the temperatures will create when I break up the stripes!

Once I decided on my desired size, I broke out a notebook and did some math.I used a size chart that I found on Pinterest to determine I wanted a “toddler size” blanket, which would be 36 x 48 inches. I practiced my C2C stitches decided my gauge would work with the suggested blanket sizes. Looks out my blanket needs to be 48 pixels by 64 pixels. (Do you call them pixels? Clusters? I’m going with pixels for this project.)

Now I have a degree in meteorology (aka math), but math in public is very hard. So here we go:

• 48 pixels wide x 64 pixels long = 3072 pixels total in my blanket.
• 3072 pixels / 365 days = 8.414

So each day will be 8.414 pixels worth of that temperature’s color. I’m gonna round that to 8 because you can’t stitch 0.4 stitches. Or can you? Someone should invent that.

• 8 * 365 = 2,920 pixels

So I’ll have 3072 – 2920 = 152 stitches to catch up and make it even. I can either add in 152 stitches along the way (approximately 1 extra stitch every 2-3 days) or I can adjust to find a length/width of a blanket that will give me an even number AND favorable dimensions. That requires more math. Right now I’m going with adding an extra stitch in along the way!

You can follow my progress on my Instagram @thetravelinghooker.

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