A cool summer day: June 10 (and June 14 too).

Wow! It’s June 30. Time has flown by—half the year is gone, which means my blanket is about half finished!

Getting to this point is a pretty big milestone. This is my first blanket, the biggest crochet project I’ve undertaken to date, so it’s a pretty huge commitment. So far so good! I’ve managed to avoid burnout (though there have been moments!) and while there’s still a lot of seaming to do, the rows are coming together. The blanket isn’t quite big enough to start snuggling under yet (don’t really need that at this time of year) but it’s getting there. My mountain of yarn is starting to wind down too. Some colors are reducing faster than others. The bag I keep all the individual squares in is bursting!

In addition to being the halfway point of 2018, it’s the end of the second quarter too. Let’s see where things are at!

May 15, 2018: the first lilac square of the year.

Last month I talked about how April didn’t go as planned after my vacation to New Zealand. By month-end I still had all of the April squares to do on top of needing to start keeping on top of the May squares. Now it’s the end of May, and thankfully, I made it! It was a lot of work that stressed me out a few times and left my fingers feeling raw more than once, but all the April squares are finished, while May is completed more or less up to where I’d normally be for a month-end update. Whew!

A couple of notable milestones occurred while making all those squares:

• April 12 marked the date I could seam the first and second rows together!
• On May 12 I was able to add the third row!
• On May 15 the high reached 28°C (82.4°F). Hot, at least for this time of year! This triggered me to use yarn from the highest temperature bracket on my chart for the first time. Each color has now been used at least once!

April Fool’s Day square.

I’m back! My trip to New Zealand was amazing. I’ll have a post with photos up soon! For now, let’s talk about the temperature blanket…

I mentioned at the end of the March update that I would have a pile of squares to do after my vacation. Boy, was I right! Not only have I not done any squares (except for April 1, 2018, shown at right) from the time I was away yet, I haven’t finished the last remaining March squares either, nor any squares for the other April days after I arrived back in Canada. Yikes! :( The main culprit has been the chest cold that came back with me and that it has taken me about ten days to get over the jet lag. Originally I expected to do two or three squares each night after work to get caught up but it just hasn’t worked out yet. Instead, I’ll have to try doubling up on squares during the month of May now that I’m starting to feel better and am getting back to my normal sleep schedule.

Not a speck of green for St. Patty’s Day.

According to the calendar, it’s supposed to be spring. Supposed to be. The snow flying by the window indicates otherwise, but then, I do live in the Great White North…

March, like February, hasn’t been that fun as far as the weather goes. Snow, and snow, and more snow. And just when we started to think we were done, yep, even more snow! As I write this, southern Alberta is under yet another heavy snowfall warning, with up to twenty centimeters expected. By tomorrow morning it should be done, maybe. We’ll see. I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about this apparent never-ending winter, and Old Man Winter and Mother Nature might just want to stick it to us for a bit longer.

You’d think, having been born here and lived here my whole life to date, that I’d be used to this kind of crap weather. Nope. I’m with the complainers: sick of winter, bring on spring and more colors for my blanket!

February 3, 2018 – the birthday square!

No getting around it: February has been cold. Miserable, actually. According to the news, Calgary has been having the coldest February in twenty-five years. I believe it! There’ve been epic road closures and multiple days of snowpocalypse. We’ve had over four times the amount of snow than what we normally get in February. March is typically our heaviest month for the white stuff so I shudder to think about what might still be coming before spring arrives.

February 3 was my birthday. Instead of going out to celebrate, I holed up inside and watched a blizzard roar past my windows. The overnight low that day was -28°C (-18.4°F) while the high only got to -19°C (-2.2°F). Yuck! But that wasn’t the worst of it! We had more than a few nights that dipped into the -30s. There was a chinook that gave us relief for a few days… On February 13 the high climbed to 7°C (44.6°F). T-shirt weather!

January 12, 2018

Whoosh! The first month of 2018 has flown by! (It seems to me that as you get older, time seems to pass by more quickly, which is really a drag.) With almost a full month’s worth of squares done, it’s a good opportunity to show off progress on the blanket.

New Year’s Day was cold(ish): -28°C (-18.4°F) for the low and -7°C (19.4°F) for the high. The high was not bad (setting aside whatever the windchill was that day), but that overnight temp is brr! Perfect for staying in and crocheting! We had a few other really cold days this month, but unless Mother Nature or Old Man Winter decide to take one last swipe at us before February 1, the coldest day for January was the 11th, where the overnight low was -33°C (-27.4°F) and it only warmed up to -23°C (-9.4°F) for the day. Frosty! January 12 was a bit better, with -26°C (-14.8°F) for the low and -13°C (8.6°F) for the high. The warmest day was the 16th: a chinook blew in and we managed to get to 8°C (46.4°F) during the day, which meant all the snow melted and the roads were very sloppy.

2018 has arrived and I’m excited to “officially” begin my temperature blanket. :) In Calgary we’ve been having a deep freeze, so curling up on the sofa to work on this crochet project sounds just perfect.

My goal was to finish all sixty of the blank filler squares that the pattern requires by December 31, 2017 and I did! Truth be told I fell off the “one square a day” wagon after reaching square forty-four due to some other commitments and shenanigans that monopolized my time…and also because making that many black squares over and over and over got really boring (Color! My hook cries out for color!). After Christmas I powered through and got the last sixteen squares made, just under the wire!

Piles of black filler squares.

I decided to get a head start on the temperature blanket! The pattern calls for sixty “blank” squares that don’t correspond to any calendar days so there’s no reason not to do them ahead of time. :) Sixty is a lot of squares though, so just like with the rest of the blanket, I plan to do just one per day for the next two months so I don’t become overwhelmed or burnt out.

My first two blanket squares, made with Bernat Blanket yarn in Coal.

This is my first time making granny squares as well as an actual blanket so it’s going to be quite an adventure! Overall, Bernat Blanket yarn is easy to work with, although so far I’ve found pulling the magic circle closed can be a bit tough—but that may be because I crochet pretty tightly and this is bulky yarn. I’m sure as I get more practice with more squares I’ll get the hang of it! I also have to get some mats so I can block the squares as I make them.

I wrote last time about how it’s been a hot summer in Calgary so Mom and I decided to tweak our temperature blanket charts in case next summer is just as hot. I made some changes to my chart and then ordered the Bernat yarn I needed. When the (very big) box arrived I excitedly laid out the balls…and immediately decided that a few of the colors weren’t going to work for me. Sigh! I guess I am a yarn snob (and I want my blanket to be really awesome)…

So, more changes! In the end I adjusted the temperature brackets for my blanket too, while Mom is keeping to the original set but with the +30° and -30° brackets added on. (We also discovered that the original set of charts were both missing a bracket for -1°C to -4°C. Oops! So, don’t use the charts from the previous post!) Here is where we’ve ended up:

The summer has flown by and soon 2018 will be here! It might be a bit early to be thinking about the new year for most things, but when it comes to yarn projects more lead time seems better, especially when trying to source specific yarn or adhere to a particular plan. The other day I reminded Mom that we should think about getting yarn for our temperature blankets. She (quite excitedly) exclaimed that she had finally found a pattern she felt she could use—and now I’m excited about it too!