The beast is complete!
The blanket ended up being 49 ft2 and weighing 3 lbs, with 224 stitches per row and 365 rows in garter stitch.
I am very proud of myself for having committed to such an arduous project. As one can imagine after spending a year on one thing, I have some thoughts on what I love about my blanket, and what I would have done differently:
- Love — Texture play: Garter is an incredibly simple stitch pattern where you knit every stitch throughout, leading to some wonderfully squishy ridges. For my project, I used mostly acrylic yarn, except for the white, which was 100% cotton. Cotton yarn isn’t smooth and slippery like most yarn, and is instead somewhat firm. Having two wildly different textures makes my blanket more dynamic, and the garter ridges really make it pop.
- Done different — Capturing snow/rain: I wish I had captured rain and snowfall, such as holding my main yarn double with a strand of colour-coded mohair (like white for snowfall, blue for rain) to tell the story of that day more explicitly. For example, despite reasonably warm weather, we had a very rainy spring — it rained almost every day in May, but there’s no way of knowing just by looking at the blanket.
- Love — Community resources: It wasn’t until I was more than 90% of the way through my project that I learned about temperature-blanket.com. This would have been an unbelievably valuable resource to me in the beginning, not only for inspiration but planning, as this website is a massive database of global weather patterns, yarn brands, and colours. I’ve been having fun just playing around with it these past few weeks. I used the system to create mock-ups of what my blanket would have looked like if I’d done some things differently, as you will soon see.
- Done different — Not so average: I don’t think I would use average temperatures again for my metrics, as it doesn’t quite capture the true “feel” of many days. Although 2022 seemed quite a mild year overall, capturing the highs and/or the lows instead might have been more interesting.
- Love — Custom legend label: Perusing Etsy, I found this leatherworker in the UK, AJW Leather, who makes custom leather legend labels for your temperature blanket. It was a beautiful finishing touch to my blanket.
- Done different — More colours: I used only seven colours in my temperature blanket (eight if you include my poor disused red), and I acknowledge that I played a little fast and loose with my colour choices and the range of temperatures they represent. Some ranged from 3 degrees, 7, or even 10. If I were to make another blanket with average temperatures as my metric, I would probably use at least 10 colours, with a range of about 5 degrees in each.
- Love — Stash buster: I almost never make stuff with worsted-weight yarn these days, and the main reason for my somewhat haphazard colour scheme is that I was trying to use at least some of what I already had on hand, between project leftovers and the yarn we found on that bus on my in-law’s property. In fact, the white cotton yarn is the Bernat Handicrafter Cotton yarn, several small balls of which were from the bus, likely from the 1990s. You can’t even get the little balls of Handicrafter Cotton anymore, only humungous balls are available at the store today. So I’m not sure if my stash was particularly “busted” in the end, but I still had fun!