New Year’s weekend Jason and I learned about temperature blankets. I had heard of them back when I used to belong to Facebook groups for crocheting several years ago, but hadn’t felt motivated to look into them at all back then because I was already working on my dad’s granny square blanket and it was taking forever. We learned how they are crochet one day at a time based on the weather that day, and we each loved the idea. We looked up a lot of people’s techniques and patterns for making their own temperature blankets in previous years.
Meanwhile, around the same time I first heard of temperature blankets, I also first heard of C2C blankets. I have always been meaning in the back of my mind to look into what they were and how to make them. Because I knew their name stands for “corner-to-corner,” I knew generally how they must work, but hadn’t ever learned the specifics. So I looked into them that same weekend in early January, and was really happy with how they seemed like they would work well to make a temperature blanket.
At first, I started following a pattern I found on someone’s blog for a C2C temperature blanket, but after a couple of days, Jason pointed out that the blanket would be the size of half our living room if I continued at that pace. Jason to the rescue! By day Jason is a computer programmer. He quickly built a little tool that would let us use different configurations of yarn colors, temperature ranges, and numbers of the little C2C squares that I have seen called “pixels” in patterns online. Using his tool, we were able to see exactly how large my blanket would end up being depending on how many squares I crochet each day, and what the different flow of colors was likely to be based on temperatures from our area that he imported from NOAA. It was so cool!
Here are the colors and temperature ranges I ended up choosing:
These are all Impeccable Yarn by Loops and Threads from Michaels. I’m crocheting 20 squares per day, with 13 extra squares scattered throughout that should make the blanket end up even at the end of 2021. For now, whenever I have 2 days in a row with the same color, I add an extra square there. I’m doing it now because I have smaller cold ranges than I do warm ranges.
Here’s what it looks like so far, at the end of January:
Jason is perfecting his tool and will be adding it to our Crafty Reason site when it is ready so that other people can use it to efficiently and easily generate their own patterns for making their own C2C temperature blankets!
As you can see from my blanket so far, it has been a cold month. It’s looking like today’s high temperature will only be in the low 20’s, so it will likely be another Lavender day.
Stay warm and safe, and happy crocheting!
~Crafty Reba