Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Welcome, 2017

There are so many great things about a new year! While I try not to set unrealistic goals, I do appreciate the feeling of a fresh start!

In my never-ending quest to use up more fabric, I have a fun project I'm going to try this year: a Temperature Quilt!

Inspired by this lady's temperature afghan, my mom decided to start a temperature afghan for 2017, in crochet. She suggested I try something similar, and I was intrigued. Since I'm not likely to crochet a whole row of an afghan daily right now, I decided to design a temperature quilt.

My quilt design involves a horizontal quilt row for every week, made of 7 "bricks" (which can be precut and handy in a variety of colors). If I keep track of the daily high temperatures (or look them up online after the fact!), I can put together a week's temperature bricks pretty quickly.

Here's my color/temperature scale:

100s - Reds
Upper 90s - Dark Oranges
   Lower 90s - Oranges
Upper 80s - Golden Yellows
   Lower 80s - Light Yellows
Upper 70s - Darker Greens
   Lower 70s - Lighter Greens
Upper 60s - Turquoises
   Lower 60s - Teals
Upper 50s - Lighter Blues
   Lower 50s - Medium Blues
Upper 40s - Dark Blues
   Lower 40s - Deep Navy Blues
Upper 30s - Light Purples
   Lower 30s - Dark Purples


Here are some of my initial fabric choices, although I've since decided to take out the pink and brown and add in more blues and purples:

ProsperityStuff Temperature Quilt Initial Fabric Pull

My color scale gives me some freedom to make the quilt scrappy, pretty, and use a variety of fabrics, so that I can mostly use what I have. I figure, even if the high temp today is the same as tomorrow, I can use a similar-color-but-different-print, just to keep it interesting.


My design looks like this:

ProsperityStuff Temperature Quilt Graph Paper Layout

I spent some time looking at temperature quilt designs, and found most of them uninspiring. So I figured out my own layout. Long skinny rows for each week help to organize the randomness. Offsetting the rows and adding a border make it look neat. I'll probably do black prints (or black-and-white) fabrics for the borders, which should set off the colors pretty nicely.

I'm precutting a bunch of colors today ... bricks cut at 2¼" x 12½", and little black squares for the offset-border-edges cut at 2¼" x 2¼". The idea is to end up with a queen-size quilt (80-something inches by 90-something, maybe?).

I've started a daily-high-temperature list, and I might even fill in or color in my graph paper design as I go.

So, I'll try and include some pictures and updates as I make some progress!

2 comments:

  1. Can't wait to see the finished project.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Linked over from Jo's Country Junction. LOVE your quilt plan!! Contemplated one of my own, but decided that it would have to wait for (at least) another year.

    ReplyDelete

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