A Labour of Love: knitting a baby temperature blanket

Baby blankets make great gifts, and temperature blankets are hugely popular. So why not combine them?

I had the idea for a baby temperature blanket, documenting each day of the pregnancy up to the birth, when I was working on my own temperature blanket last year. Since we weren’t going to have kids of our own, I sat on this idea until the opportunity presented itself. Lo and behold, our dear friend K arrived for our annual visit this past January four months pregnant, a subtle announcement of her and her husband’s first child.

After she left, I began my master plan to knit a temperature baby blanket, documenting the temperature for each day of K’s pregnancy up to the birth.

Taking the lessons I learned from that first temperature blanket, I wanted to use the high temperatures this time as my metric, with smaller and even increments between each colour change. As such, I ended up with 16 total colours needed, ranging from 35 to -40 degrees.

I used the Scheepjes Stone Washed XL line, for its huge array of colours and the coziness and durability of the cotton-wool blend. I never ended up using the two most extreme shades in that range, but I’d rather have them and not need them than need them and not have them.

I based my blanket on Stephen West’s Painting Honeycombs Blanket. Instead of each row of honeycombs being one colour per the original design, each honeycomb “cell” was its own day. Because of the frequent colour changes, the back of the project was a nest of loose ends, regardless of my weaving-in skills. For ease, esthetics, and security, I sewed a piece of flannelette to the back.

Not wanting to ask intrusive questions, I did some math to determine that the data collection for my blanket should start in October. Using my tried-and-true combination of Visual Crossing weather data and conditional formatting in Excel, I quickly caught up on her pregnancy progress. As her due date approached, I found myself in a sort of limbo of my own. K waiting to meet her baby, me waiting to finish her blanket properly.

Serendipitously, two hours after I started drafting this article, K texted me to announce that her daughter was born that very morning.

It was something of an intimate experience. Even though we live in completely different provinces, there were days when I felt like making this gift brought me closer to my friend through glimpses of the weather forecast. The warm autumn to the bitterly cold winter, culminating in a blazing hot summer. If I wasn’t knitting a daily temperature blanket, I would have no reason to keep such an eye on the forecast for a small city in Saskatchewan.

As the seasons changed, I found myself with an abundance of leftover colours that, unless it was suddenly going to plummet below zero in June, I wasn’t going to be using in the blanket again. So, I gathered up my skeins and scraps and made an extra gift — a very colourful, large and floppy stuffed zebra. I used a pattern from the book Knitted Wild Animal Friends by Louise Crowther, a follow-up to her book Knitted Animal Friends.

I’m grateful to have K in my life. She was my husband’s friend first and he likes to jokingly chide me for “stealing” his friends, but it’s not my fault that they’re all so lovely!