The Team Janie Crow Temperature Blanket

Will you join in with us?

Have you seen temperature blankets popping up on Instagram and Pinterest over the last few years? Well, here at Janie Crow we have already made one based on one of Jane's designs and we would love you to join us by making one of your own over the course of 2025! ​

​What exactly is a temperature blanket (sometimes known as a climate blanket)?

Well, the idea is that for a whole year you crochet a row or round of a blanket in a yarn shade that you have assigned to a temperature range. You might choose to use your local temperatures or those from another destination. You may choose to assign cool colours like whites, blues and greys for winter temperatures, maybe greens and yellows for those warmer days in spring, through to warmer shades like pinks, purples and reds for those hotter summer days. 

These are our colour choices on one of our Emma Ball Colour Cards - you can find them by clicking on the image

​
​If you choose to join in by making your own temperature blanket in 2025, then at the end of the year you will have a yarny record of the daily temperatures over the previous 12 months. Of course, differing climates may well result in a very different blanket depending on how colours are chosen. You can imagine that a blanket made in Switzerland will vary hugely to one made in Greece for example! 

For our Team Janie Crow blanket we decided to use blocks worked in the round, rather than work in rows and we thought that the plain motifs from the Spirit of Flora project were just the thing to make!

​If you visit the Spirt of Flora project page by clicking here you'll be able to download the free patterns we have used.

These are examples of plain motifs

Here is an example of a floral square - isn't it lovely? □

​​When making our blanket we made a plain block each week and made a flower one monthly.

The plain blocks included yarn shades that represented the temperatures for that week, with each round representing the temperature on one day.

At the end of each month an additional floral block was made to represent the lowest, highest and average temperature for the preceding month.

In total we ended up with 64 blocks which enabled us to make a blanket of 8 x 8 blocks.  

​What do you need to do to join in next year?

Choose your colours and yarn:
The very first thing you need to do is to decide on your yarn colours and, in order to do that, it would help to have an idea of the typical temperature range where you are. For example here in North London we typically don't see temperatures drop too much below 0 degrees celsius or go much above 30 degrees, so for our range we assigned a colour for anything below 0 and then moved in 2 degree increments up to 29 degrees and above. That gave us 16 yarn shades in total. We decided to use yarns from our stashes and came up with our colour chart on the basis of what we found. 

MAX TEMP       COLOUR                      YARN (ALL STYLECRAFT)
(Degrees
celsius)                                     
up to 0              Hint of Silver                Special DK
1 - 2                   Silver                             Special DK
3 - 4                   Mint                              Life DK
5 - 6                  Turquoise                     Special DK
7 - 8                   Cascade                       Life DK
9 - 10                 French Blue                  Life DK 
11 - 12                 Apple Green                 Special DK
13 - 14                 Meadow                       Special DK
15 - 16                 Lime                             Special DK
17 - 18                 Buttermilk                    Special DK
19 - 20                Saffron                         Special DK
21 - 22                Copper                         Special DK 
23 - 24               Pale Rose                     Special DK
25 - 26               Grape                           Special DK
27 - 28                Raspberry                    Special DK
29 +                    Cranberry                     Life DK 

If you want to use fewer colours, you could make your temperature ranges wider, but typically the fewer degrees are assigned to each colour the more varied your end result. 

We printed out our temperature record chart and added it to our Emma Ball project folder along with a colour chart and other notes - you can find the project folders by clicking on the photo

How to find out daily temperatures:
You could use a thermometer in your garden and check it in the hottest part of the day or choose an online weather service set to your location and record the highest daily temperatures from there. 

How to calculate the average monthly temperature:
Add all the temperatures for the month together and divide the resulting number by the number of days in the month.

Gather everything you need ready to get started on January 1st 2025
​
Equipment:
4mm (US G/6) crochet hook
Stitch markers
Large eye darning needle
Small labels to number your squares - you could attach them with a safety pin
Notebook

Patterns:
You can find the free written pattern and charts for the motifs via the Spirit of Flora page here
Yarn key - you can download a template here
Temperature recording chart - you can download our version here
We will post a suggested blanket layout in future blog posts.
​
Yarn:
We can't tell you how much yarn you will need as this will be dependent on how many colours you decide to use and the temperature fluctuation where you are, but it would be sensible to start with yarn that you know is easy to obtain should you require more of any colour. For our sample we used the amounts listed in the table below for the squares and used up leftovers for the borders.

​How to allocate days to the rounds: 

For the weekly blocks we used the pattern for the completely plain square and made the Foundation Round and Round 1 on Day 1 and then worked a single further round on each of the following 6 days.

​The (monthly) floral blocks were made using Saffron for the centre and the petals were made using the yarn shades that represented the lowest and highest temperatures for the month. The rest of the square was made in the colour representing the average monthly temperature. See the image below for guidance:

Get started! 
If you fancy making your own temperature blanket next year we will be posting regular help and advice here on the blog and on our social media channels.

If you would like to join in, remember to start recording your temperatures from the 1st January 2025. You might choose to record a week's temperatures and then make your block in one go, or you may decide to work a round every day. It is all about completing the project in a way that works for you!

We will be posting more as new temperature blankets take shape and we'd love to share some of your progress too, so please post your photos on social media and remember to tag them with #janiecrowtempblanket25

So what do you think?  Are you in? Drop us a comment below if you plan to take part and of course, do ask any questions as we'd love to get them all answered before we start!

HAVE FUN!

Emma & Gemma
xx