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If you read the post on my bear blanket, you’ll know that I often come up with crocheting endeavors I don’t have time for. And that my daughter still doesn’t have a mama-made baby blanket. My bad. But I’ve always wanted to make a temperature blanket. I’m a meteorologist by trade and I just can’t resist a crossover of weather AND crocheting! But honestly, I’ve never been a fan of how they look with standard “hot to cold” colors (read: red to blue) and a horizontal striped pattern. I also never had a good reason to make one until – *LIGHT BULB* – I thought I could make one that represented the first year of each of my kids’ lives. Brilliant! More ideas to put off for years. But in my defense I had never found the right colors and stitch to use to make it less typical and “stripey.”

A few months back I saw an Instagram post of someone else’s color choices for their temperature blanket. It was a range of pinks and purples and blues, and it called out to me “baby girl blanket!” I ran out THAT DAY to Michaels (gotta jump on the ambition when I can) and picked out a pretty mermaid tail array of yarn to use. I choose Caron Simply Soft.

It’s so pretty. Worth the 17 tries it took to get this picture with Ms. Grabby Pants around.

Now that I had the yarn, I Pinterested for HOURS looking for the right stitch. I saw a few diagonal striped blankets and fell in love, and I decided I would do my first “corner to corner” or C2C stitch project! I’d never done this stitch before but the C2C temperature blankets I saw looked so good (I looked at a ton of projects under the Instagram hashtag #C2CMAL2018 from the It’s All In A Nutshell blog). It creates just the right texture and adds variety to the standard stripe pattern.

I tested out my C2C skills and assigned my colors to coordinating temperature ranges. Since I’m not doing this in real time, I need to use past weather data. Luckily my weather skillz made it easy for me to find that info 🙂 I used AccuWeather’s historical weather page, although WeatherUnderground also has a tool where you can click through each day to see the high temp. I prefer the AccuWeather tool because I can copy it all to a spreadsheet (or just save the page) and see it all at once.

Now that all the prep work is done, I need to put hook to yarn! I also need to solicit the inspiration for my son’s version. We are moving across the ocean this summer, but I’d love to get it started and have them both ready for Christmas presents.

You can read my updates here and here and follow my progress on Ingragram @thetravelinghooker.

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