Temperature Art

I am in the longest crochet drought of my life.

Having said that, I hope that you won't run away if you don't crochet, because this isn't going to get (too) technical.  Or (I hope) boring.

A couple of samples of my work.

Crocheted in 1976, part of an afghan I still use on occasion

I have crocheted since the fall of 1970.  One of my high school friends, who also went to my college, showed me something (probably a crocheted vest, which were popular at the time) she had made.  I was already shopping for one of these vests and found that already made vests were a bit beyond my budget.

I decided to learn how to crochet in order to make one of those vests. (If you look on Pinterest, you'll see various crocheted "vintage 1970's vests" - that's what I was trying to make). 

I asked my friend to teach me how to crochet.  She taught me one stitch, and I was on my own to teach myself enough to make the project.  

Basically, my crochet is self taught.  I know I don't do certain things correctly, but I don't care. 

The stitch the friend taught me is called the slip stitch.  The slip stitch in crochet has very little height.  You use it to join work, to edge a work, or to travel to another part of the row (other than the beginning, which you might need to do if, for example, you are creating an armhole for a sweater).  But what I found is that if you crochet an entire project in slip stitch (say, a scarf) it had an interesting texture and was also elastic.

I used to spend a lot of time crocheting.   I would crochet while watching TV, while my then young son was playing, or during work lunchtimes. I wouldn't crochet in the summer but our long winters were perfect for crochet. I've just never blogged about it much.

I made this for my young son around 1994 - part of a racecar flag afghan

I haven't picked up a crochet hook in over a year.  And, I have all this yarn my spouse keeps bugging me about.  "Can't you use it?" he asks me. But I can't work up the ambition to crochet, with maybe one exception.

In October, spouse and I visited Salt Springs State Park during a Susquehanna County Art Trail event in Pennsylvania.  

Salt Springs State Park

There, a woman was displaying her quilts in the Visitors Center.   Several of them were what she called "Temperature Quilts".  She had quilts for 2020 and 2021. (No pictures).

What a temperature quilt does is track the low and high temperatures (or only the high temperatures - a lot simpler) for each day of a given year. You assign different colors for temperature ranges.  For example, lavender fabric represents a temperature range of -15F to 5F.  Medium blue 6F to 20F.  Light blue 21F to 32F.  And so forth, until the highest temperatures, say orange for 81F to 90F and red for 91F to 100F.  It rarely gets about 100F here. 

So if your town's high temperature for January 1 is 10F, you insert a strip of medium blue.  If your high for July 15 is 93F, you insert a strip of red.  You end up with a blanket containing stripes representing the temperatures of each day.  The more volatile your climate is, the more colorful it is. 

You can even insert a stripe for news commentary.  The Salt Springs artist had a black strip for the day Pennsylvania shut down due to COVID.

I was so intrigued, I looked up crocheted temperature afghans and there is a lot of information online.

Although I would have to do some math (not my strength), the concept intrigues me. When I read, on one of the sites explaining temperature afghans, that you could make an interesting blanket by using the slip stitch, I was (no pun intended) hooked.

Will I go through my yarn and try to figure out how to make one of these?  In my New York State climate, it would be fairly colorful.

We'll see.