Temperature Blanket - Update 2

The colour I chose next to work with is a light greyish blue. I'm not sure how I ended up with so much of this yarn in my stash but I had a great idea on how to use it up. There are two types of days in northern British Columbia Januarys, either frightfully cold with the most amazing crisp blue skies and a thick hoar frost on trees or skies full of soft grey clouds overflowing with snowflakes just waiting to come tumbling down in the fattest, fluffiest flakes you can imagine -- snowflakes that call to you to stick out your tongue to catch. So the next piece I chose to do was snowflakes on a "background" of greyish blue. The rows are quite basic, just rows of hdc and dc but the snowflakes were fun to do. However, as you can likely see from the picture, I've procrastinated stitching them on. 

Row 16: Chain 2 (counts as first hdc), turn and hdc in each stitch across row. (Light greyish blue)

 

Row 17: Chain 3 (counts as first dc), turn and dc in each stitch across row. (Light greyish blue)

Row 18: Chain 3 (counts as first dc), turn and dc in each stitch across row. (Light greyish blue)

Row 19: Chain 3 (counts as first dc), turn and dc in each stitch across row. (Light greyish blue)

Row 20: Chain 3 (counts as first dc), turn and dc in each stitch across row. (Light greyish blue)

Row 21: Chain 2 (counts as first hdc), turn and hdc in each stitch across row. (Light greyish blue)

Snowflakes: I chose to do Snowflake 2 from Beautiful Crochet Stuff website, found at: http://beautifulcrochetstuff.com/5-free-crochet-snowflake-patterns/. 

I made 10 snowflakes with the intent of spacing them out but i will admit to not having stitched them on yet. you could choose any snowflake pattern that appeals to you or even create a random flurry mirroring nature and making each snowflake unique. There are tons of patterns available on Pinterest.

Temperature blanket update

Temperature Blanket

In northern British Columbia, our temperature is pretty constant so I knew when I started crocheting a row per day to reflect the temperature there would be little colour variation. I had decided that any temperatures under -20 degrees Celsius would be purple and that temperatures between -19 degrees Celsius and 0 degrees would be blue but rather than one shade of blue, I would make a study in blue. I was inspired by little woolie's "Mixed stitch stripey blanket crochet-a-long" and love the look of the mixture of stitches. You can find her blog post here: http://littlewoollie.blogspot.com/p/mixed-stitch-stripey-blanket-crochet.html.

I was a bit concerned about how long the potential blanket would be if I used all double crochet stitches to do the 365 rows so I began with two rows of half double crochet. As these days were below -20, as days in early January are, these are dark purple.

One of my aims for this project was to use some leftover yarn, so as the temperature warmed up a wee bit, I looked through my wool stash and came up with this great dark blue. I worked a row of hdc and a row of dc in the dark blue followed by a row of sc in turquoise and another row of sc in the dark blue.

Foundation Row: Make a chain the length of the desired width of your blanket. I did count my stitches as I wanted the stitches to be divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, etc. I chose to begin with 240 stitches. Add an additional 2 ch to count as the first hdc of Row 1. (purple)

Row 1: Skip first 2 ch and hdc in each stitch across the chain. (purple)

Row 2: Chain 2 (counts as first hdc), turn and hdc in each stitch across row. (purple)

Here I switched to the blue:

Row 3: Chain 2 (counts as first hdc), turn and hdc in each stitch across row. (Dark blue)

Row 4: Chain 3 (counts as first dc), turn and dc in each stitch across row. (Dark blue)

Row 5: Chain 1 (counts as first sc), turn and sc in each stitch across row. (Turquoise)

Row 6: Chain 1 (counts as first sc), turn and sc in each stitch across row. (Dark blue)

Row 7: Chain 3 (counts as first dc), turn and dc in each stitch across row. (Turquoise)

Row 8: Chain 2 (counts as first hdc), turn and hdc in each stitch across row. (Turquoise)

As I said I was inspired by little woolie's Mixed stitch stripey blanket crochet-a-long and winter in northern BC is cold and snowy so I thought that white bobbles on a dark blue background would mimic our long dark nights that often filled with big fluffy white snowflakes. The actual instructions for the bobble stitch come from Tales from Cuckoo Land (http://talesfromcuckooland.blogspot.com.au/p/bobble-stitch-tutorial-2-bobbles-in.html?m=1), which offers very detailed instructions that I won't repeat here but rather encourage you to visit their blog.

Row 9-11: Bobble stitch in dc from the instructions on Tales from Cuckoo Land.

Next came some granny stripes, again inspired by little woolie's blog and the snow outside I thought a row of white granny square stitches would sit perfectly between the dark blue that was reminiscent of our long dark nights. First I crocheted a row of turquoise hdc to separate the two sections.

Row 12: Chain 2 (counts as first hdc), turn and hdc in each stitch across row. (Turquoise)

Granny Rows:

Row 13: Chain 3, *3 dc in next stitch (cluster) skip next 2 stitches, repeat from * across. Depending upon your stitch count, it may not come out evenly and you may need to improvise to keep the stitch count and keep a straight edge. (Dark blue)

Row 14: Chain 5 (counts as 1st dc and gives a bit of space to reach the 1st gap), 3 dc in each gap (between each cluster). Again depending upon your stitch count you may need to improvise at the end to keep the row straight. (White)

Row 15: Chain 3, 3 dc (cluster) in between each cluster across. (Dark blue)

The image shown here shows the progress so far. I will try to take more images more often so the next sections aren't as long.