Friday, January 2, 2015

The Year Of Adulting Blanket

I did a dumb thing.

I offered help to someone trying to figure out how to do a temperature blanket in squares because 365 will not make a rectangular shape.  (In case you're wondering, a temperature blanket -- or scarf -- consists of assigning a color to a temperature range and working a number of rows or a square in the color corresponding to the day's high/low/average temperature.)  I admitted that perhaps I knew all the math because I was eventually planning to make one.

"But not this year," I said, "Too much is happening this year for that."

Too much is happening this year for me to make the blanket that is supposed to help me document an entire year of my life.

...Crap.

It makes way more sense to pick an important, dynamic year than a year in which only minor changes occur.  For instance, doing it last year would not have been very interesting since the most important things that happened all year were my grandfather's death in April and getting a job in the last week of December.

Which brings me to this year.  I have dubbed 2015 "The Year Of Adulting".  I'm moving out this year, leaving my first college, getting my own car, and various other adult-ish events will also occur (incidentally, at the end of the year I'll be legally allowed to celebrate these events with alcohol).  This is an important year for me, and it makes a lot of sense to record that.

So I guess this is the year for the one-year blanket.  Here's how that'll work.
Every day I'll make a teeny three-round square (my own design; pattern will follow I promise) and join it to the work-in-progress.  All of these squares will be different combinations of Hobby Lobby's I Love This Yarn, three colors per square.  (Please note that this isn't because I support Hobby Lobby -- in light of their recent legal actions I'm very unhappy with them -- but because I have scraps lying around from both my Octuple Rainbow and Ian's Friendship Star and I really do love the yarn.)  I'll take a picture centered on the day's square and journal some things about the day that I'd like to remember.  That'll be 365 squares.

At the end of the month I'll make another square (possibly with sparkly thread; I'll figure that out by the end of the month) and take a picture centered on it.  That picture will accompany a review of the month in which I can talk about big things or important things or memorable things from that month.  That makes 12 more squares.

At the end of the year I'll make an additional square (which I'll fancify in some way, probably) and use the picture to accompany a celebration of the year with its highs, lows, and especially important bits.  That'll be 1 more square.

365 + 12 + 1 = 378

This number can make a rectangle 18x21 squares.  My squares come out just a bit under 3 inches when they're joined, so we'll be somewhere in the vicinity of 54x63 inches.  It'll probably be way short of that, but the actual size isn't all that important since it'll be useful at any size.  Since it's a 6:7 ratio it'll look sort of square-ish, especially with the noise of all the color.

I've made two squares now, since it's January 2nd and I figured I could cheat the first one a bit.  Ready?  Click the pictures to get a closer look, or hover over them to see the colors I used.

January 1
January 2

As usual, the join is from here.  This join is so great.  I actually can't sing its praises enough.

I numbered the colors and then used a random number generator to pick three of them.  I'm recording the "codes" so I can be sure not to duplicate them later.

Is this a stupid plan, or just a really ambitious one?  As Ian and I have discussed, the distinction can be a vague one sometimes.  Thoughts?

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