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:

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:

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!