Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern

New year, same me, new crochet project. That’s how the old saying goes, right?

I did a temperature project in 2021, while I was still vaguely a newbie at crochet, and it was a lesson in discipline. One row every day for 365 days. Well, you know how that went: I did it! But it sure was not the most evenly crocheted piece ever. Or the most proportional. I thought that my starting chain was long enough, and by the time I realized that the blanket was not even wide enough to cover my body, I was too far into the project and didn’t want to start over. But I was still proud of myself for accomplishing it, especially in that year, the hardest year of my life.

I didn’t do any temperature projects in 2022 or 2023. No big “reason,” just, you know, life. This year, however, I am doing another blanket, and this time I’m doing it right, goddangit.

And of course, I can’t just do the same thing again. That would be boring. I also had the vague desire to try to denote dates that were somehow important — like birthdays and anniversaries. I thought about doing that about halfway through my 2021 blanket, but as I said, I didn’t want to frog it (mostly out of laziness). So here’s what I’ve come up with:

I am going to make twelve solid granny squares, one for each month. Each day gets one row of the granny square. Each square has to be the same number of rows, so I will need to get creative for February, but that’s part of the fun. I’m using the average temperature of each day, as well, and I found a government website for historical weather data — it’s updated every day with the data from yesterday, which means I can only do up to the day before present day.

I’m going to do an interspersed cream color for those “special” days. For instance, my brother-in-law’s birthday is in early January, so that day got the special color (cream) along with the temperature color (green).

This year is going to be fun. I look forward to recording the temperature every day and coming home to add the row. I can’t wait to see what each square looks like. I also have a few more colors this year, because I’m going to change colors every ten degrees (I changed colors every fifteen degrees in 2021). Here is my chart:

Temperature	Yarn Color
special days	cream
0-10F	white
11-20F	light blue
21-30F	dark blue
31-40F	green
41-50F	yellow
51-60F	gold
61-70F	orange
71-80F	red
81-90F (and up)	dark red

Check out the palette for the year:

So far, 20 days into January, I can tell that this blanket is going to be massive. I’ve also already gotten to use five different colors!