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.]

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

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