Hi from quarantine to everyone else who's also in quarantine.
Last month or so--how long ago was that now--I found out that an office at my giant org was going to put on an art exhibit about climate change at our big open house in April, and they wanted to make temperature scarves for this town from 1970-2019 to prove how the climate has changed.
Now, I got into making temperature scarves myself in 2013 (I wonder what the hell I actually did with them now) and it was fun, so of course I was all HOPPING ON THIS BANDWAGON, pimped it to others on our Yarn Club mailing list*, and signed myself up to do the 2019 one. They did buy the yarn for us and designed the patterns via spreadsheet. You do a stripe in crochet linen stitch for each day of the year, based on what the highest temperature was that day.
* I co-ran a knit/crochet group at my work. Well, I guess we' still do, it's just gonna be mailing list now.
The Tempestry Project gives you a rundown of how this goes, but I'll just say that each yarn shade changes every 5 degrees or so. So the 50's were in greens, the 60's were in yellow, the 70's were in orange, and the 80's to 105 were in different shades of red, getting warmer. I think if I'd gone over 110 it went to brown, but I never got that far. I didn't even get any shades of blue in my kit.
How times have changed since I got this yarn, y'all. Now the event it was supposed to go to has been canceled. Well, maybe next year. I think when I send my pictures to the organizer I'll suggest the possibility of everyone sending in pictures somehow to do an online exhibit, perhaps.
Thoughts I had while doing this:
- I kind of wish there were dividing color rows for each month so you can see how they progressed (which I did on my own scarves back in the day). I'll say that when you look at it, roughly January-March were primarily greens and yellows and same for November/December, but April through October were pretty dang warm.
- Now, I am a warm weather person and a cold weather wuss, but I have to say that making this scarf really indicated to me that we don't have THAT long of a cold season here, so that made me feel better.
- It is funny how sometimes there are just freak warm spots or cold spots on certain days in odd times of the year for such.
- I may be the second person to finish it--one person sent in a picture already-- and in all honesty, hers was from 1991 and it was the same colors as mine! Didn't look drastically different, though I'd probably have to hold up the photo for comparison better. Too bad I can't see what say, the 1970 person was starting out with.
I admit I did have some pretty big problems doing it though. At the time the organizer was all "just use a G hook, gauge doesn't matter." Um, nope. I just whipped out a G hook and went to town and was proud of myself from going to January to July in the space of about five days. Then I brought it to the Yarn Club meeting, proudly unfurled it onto the table....and noticed that it was getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller...
I don't know what the hell it is about crochet that makes it so dang easy to lose (or gain) stitches, but it had s started out about 6-7 inches wide and was down to maybe around 4 in July...and I hadn't noticed at all since I was rolling up the scarf end as I worked on it. Then I reread the pattern and it said it should be about 8 inches wide. OOPS. So I had to pull it all out again from scratch, find myself a hook that got me to 8 inches wide gauge (a J hook, as it turns out), and start it all over again, yanking out a ruler to make sure it was staying at 8 inches. Which it mostly did....until the latter half of the scarf, where it started slightly shrinking again.
Added bonus since the organizer had divvied out just enough yarn (I did not have much extra left when done) to make it, I had to reuse the yarn but it had all been cut off a bit shorter than usual when reusing that yarn...and that was EVEN MORE ENDS TO WEAVE IN, of course. Then when the scarf started to get a bit shorter, I was about out of yarn entirely in some shades, so they just had to be a bit shorter and I hope nobody notices...and I'd try to make it 8 inches again on the colors that I had more length in. Oh well.
So overall this took me around 3 weeks to do, but I had to start from scratch all over again after the first week and pulled out several months' worth a couple more times.
It's probably 6-7 feet long, positioning this on the bed was the closest I could get to covering it all. Here's some closeups of the months in order.
And now, what next? I still have to work from home all day (I am very fortunate to be in an industry where I'm not going to lose my job for this) so I won't have as much free time as everyone else to do well, this photo....
My other projects that are halfway done right now are a fancy cabled coat, a bunch more Baby Yodas and stuffed animals for my coworkers (which well, I wish I'd done sooner because god knows I can't pass them on now....), and a cabled project I'm going to sew together patchwork style that was my "portable" project. I don't know if any of that is super appropriate to be working on under the circumstances. Can't pass on presents, can't go outside (well, I could still, I guess, but guess who's got the agoraphobia now!), so....
I think I'm going to look into some of those quarantine knitalongs. Arne and Carlos are doing a quarantine podcast/knitalong that I've been following, so I think I'll start trying that, even though that's pretty complicated Fair Isle stuff there. I also saw a pandemic knitalong on Ravelry.
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