Now that the new year has started, it was time to start my
temperature blanket. I found 2 sites that told the high temperature for my city and neither agreed with each other, so I decided to go with Weather Underground. I used a chainless single crochet starting foundation row and boy, did that make it so much easier! I originally started with 225 stitches, but when I laid it on my bed and held up a tape measure for the projected length of 365 rows, I decided to go with 250 instead. When I was working on the row for January 3rd, I decided I needed to mark the half-way and quarter points. I started counting groups of 25, and realized it didn't work out right. It turns out I only have 241 stitches! Not sure how that happened, but it actually made it easier to mark as this gives 10 stitches per hour (not counting that extra stitch!) When I first thought of marking the precipitation, I just thought I'd add the precipitation-marking-thread for the whole row, but when we had rain just in the evening/night, I realized I had to be more specific in marking
when it rained/snowed.
IF I do another one of the temperature blankets, I will leave off the precipitation marking, but still denote the holidays (as they last all day long). It takes about 10-15 minutes to crochet the one row for the day.
The high temperatures for each day were:
Jan 1: 39
Jan 2: 39 with rain in the evening/night
Jan 3: 36 with rain in the afternoon
Jan 4: 32 with snow
Jan 5: 14
Jan 6: 12
Jan 7: 15
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| The green yarn bow is to mark the front of the blanket and the colored clips mark the 3-hour increments |
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| close up to show the "sparkly" threads for the precipitation |
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| My project bag has the yarns for the most likely temperatures |
If I had used the color chart I showed at the beginning of my
original post, my blanket would have had 3 colors instead of the 4 mine has (not a big difference, but does give a little more color)
When I first was deciding which website to use for the high of the day, I noticed that Weather Underground had two spots that gave the high for the day--one near the top and one near the bottom. The temperature at the bottom given for January 1 & 2 matched the temperatures my parents had at their house (about 10 minutes from my house) which is why I decided to go with that site. I had continuously noticed that the two highs for "yesterday" differed slightly between the two listings, but continued to use the temperature given at the bottom of the page. Today I was looking at the history and discovered that the temperature at the top was for a site "5 miles west" of my town whereas the one I'd been using was for a town about an hour southeast of me! So that gave me another dilemma of whether I needed to start over and use the temperatures that where for the place closer to me. I called my dad and he told me that their high for yesterday was 15, which exactly matched the temperature that I had been using. So I guess I will continue to use the high temperatures listed for the more distant (but apparently more similar temperature-wise) city.
The differences between the temperatures was as follows:
(temperature I used / temperature for closer site)
Jan 1: 39 / 40.6
Jan 2: 39 /41.2
Jan 3: 36 / 37.2
Jan 4: 32 / 34
Jan 5: 14 /12.6
Jan 6: 12 / 14.4
Jan 7: 15 /14.2
Using the 2nd set of temperatures, the first two rows would have been green instead of blue, the next 4 days would have been the same colors I used and yesterday would have been the same color as the day before rather than the darker purple I used.
