Yesterday I stumbled across a new to me idea on the internet that I am absolutely in Love with. It's called a temperature quilt. Let's see if I can explain this in an understandable way and see if anyone wants to join me.
2 critical aspects of the quilt:
1) The quilt is based on the daily temperature for the same city for every day of the year. You do not need to actually record the temperatures. There are multiple websites that track daily temperatures. You can reference those sites when you want to work on this quilt. One example of a site that tracks and records temperatures is
www.accuweather.com.
2) You need to assign a different color for your different ranges of temperatures. For example, perhaps 90-100 degrees would be assigned the color red whereas 20-30 degrees would be assigned the color blue. The important factor is making sure that the temperature ranges you define make sense for the city you want to track. For example, I live in Western Washington and we rarely get hotter than 90 degrees and rarely get colder than 30 degrees so my temperature range will basically be between 30 degrees and 90 degrees. Do not feel obligated to use the "typical" warm/cool color ranges. Use whatever colors you love.
The Quilt Itself
Essentially the quilt is made of 365 units with one unit to represent the temperature for each day of the year. So in my above example, if on January 2nd the temperature was 30 degrees I would make a unit that is blue. If on July 1st the temperature was 93 degrees I would make a unit that is red.
The quilt can be made out of whatever unit you want. I think the easiest unit to use to represent each day would be a square of whatever size
you prefer. Then just piece your units together based on the temperature recorded for each day.
Your creativity is the limit.
Want to use strips/rectangles, hexagons, tumblers, apple cores, etc. instead of squares? Go for it!!
Want to sew your units into rows? Go for it!!
Want to sew your units into columns? Go for it !!
You do not need to work on this quilt every day. My plan is to check in on temperatures for the week every Saturday or Sunday using
www.accuweather.com and construct my quilt each weekend as the weeks go on. It shouldn't take more than 15-30 minutes each week to add the additional 5-7 units and attach them to previously constructed units.
Fabric selection
You could purchase fabric in your desired colors but I'm using my scraps. How much fabric of each color you need is completely dependent on the colors you select, the temperature ranges you define and the number of days that fall within each temperature range.