5 Reasons to never make a temperature blanket

Temperature blankets, they’re a pretty popular project to start. That’s really it though, it’s a fun idea to start but they’re terribly difficult to finish. We buy all the yarn, we make our charts, we manage to do the first month or first couple months. Then our blankets get put off to the side. It becomes almost a chore to do that row, square, hexagon, or half row every day. We have other things we’re working on or life has taken a turn. I, personally, have sworn to myself that I will never make another temperature blanket. I hated the whole thing and it’s actually still not done four years later.

Why people like to make them

I got on the temperature blanket train because it was a cool way to document the weather, at first. It didn’t seem too hard to do because you only crochet one row or one square or one hexagon or however you were making it a day. Seemed easy enough. Some people added extra things like a way to designate a birthday, anniversary, or death (unfortunately). Some took the idea of a temperature blanket and instead made a mood blanket or actual weather blanket (tracking sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy days) for the year. It’s a popular trend at the beginning of the year but often dies out from my experience.

5 reasons why I won’t make another

1. It actually took forever. Props to those who do manage to finish a temperature blanket in the year it was meant for, but I couldn’t. I got super busy as I was in college and I lost interest in it. Often, I would try to play catch up on school breaks but it never happened. I finished the squares I was making 3 years after I started it.
2. The ends. Oh my gosh, it does not matter which way you decide to make it. There are so many ends. This is what has held up my blanket. I still don’t have the ends weaved in. I dread weaving in ends and I should have thought about that when setting out to make one.
3. Buying the yarn. Honestly, it’s kind of an expensive project (like any blanket) but it’s not as predictable as others. I have some colors I only made maybe 5 blocks from it and others that I had to buy a second skein of and hope the colors weren’t off. If you wanted to buy 2 skeins of each color and had ten colors to buy, that’s adds up quick. For mine, I used I love this yarn from Hobby Lobby and I spent around fifty-three dollars after it was all said and done. Actually, I will need to buy another skein now, 4 years later so I can do a border. I didn’t use all the yarn I bought previously but it was yarn I wouldn’t use for other projects.
4. If you do squares or hexagons like I did, there is the potential issue of the middles coming undone. I’ll say that before this blanket, I never had issues with magic circles coming undone. Never. I have mended roughly five or six squares now as they continue to come undone. Ones that were woven in, in my typical fashion. I get quite upset when another one comes undone.
5. It’s huge. I will say my blanket is a decent size since I made granny squares. But it is still huge coming in at the length and width of a twin size bed. I’ll make big wearable items, but blankets just take forever and temperature blankets are always very large.

My Temperature Blanket

Below are a couple pictures of my temperature blanket. It was made for the 2016 year in Indiana. The summer was hot and the other seasons were warmer than usual. I was kind of sad to not have much variety in colors overall. It’s fourteen squares across and twenty-seven squares long. Each grey square puts a space between months, though if you look closely some sections have more than thirty-one days between. Part of that was because I put a row on wrong or I worked too fast. It turned out nice, but I will never make another temperature blanket.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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