Make a Temperature Scarf as an Alternative to a Temperature Blanket

Temperature blankets are a popular way to track a year, whether you’re stitching up the colors of the current year or a year that is important to you.

But a blanket is a big project to keep track of all year, and maybe you don’t want a giant randomly striped blanket at the end of the year, anyway.

Another option is to make a different kind of project that tracks the temperature, such as a temperature scarf or cowl. Fox and Pine Stitches has a tutorial on how to work a scarf in the round using the colors of your choice for the temperature data for where you live.

The benefit of doing a scarf is that it will use a lot less yarn, and it will also be faster to knit. This is a great way to do a project with temperature data from a year that has already passed, because you’ll be able to knit it quickly.

You can leave it as a scarf or sew the ends together and make a giant circular cowl if you’d rather.

If you do want to make a temperature blanket, there are lots of resources available to help. Craft Warehouse has a printable you can use to keep track of your range of temperatures and the colors you choose for each one.

Noble Knits has a nice guide to temperature blankets that talks about how to pick yarns, how much of each yarn you might need and links to some knit and crochet patterns you can use to make your own temperature blanket or other project.

You can work your blanket in garter stitch, stockinette, moss stitch or any other pattern that you like, and you can do one or two rows of each color, depending on the stitch pattern you are using. The circular scarf is worked in stockinette, which makes it really easy, but you could do a project like that in any stitch pattern worked in the round as well.

Have you ever made a temperature project? Did you actually finish? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Fox and Pine Stitches.]

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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