The project:
I was entranced by seeing weather throw pictures from some of my friends on Twitter, most notably @riverwillow8 and, in need of a project to distract me from the dreamlike semi-lockdown existence in which I now find myself, this seemed like a good idea. I ordered the yarn, largely Rowan Handknit cotton but some Sheepjes too from Deramores and it came in time for me to make a start on, yes, April Fools’ Day.
The idea of this data visualisation exercise is to record the temperature every day for a year. Like @riverwillow8, I’m doing a row of stocking stitch for the maximum and minimum temperature every day in my location. I had toyed with the idea of crocheting in some sort of ripple stitch but my knitting is more practiced than my crochet, and stocking stitch doesn’t require a huge amount of concentration or skill to make a daily or weekly commitment should I for some reason not be able to make it for a few days. A separate crochet blanket might well follow once I’ve worked out the details of that.
This blanket throw was originally going to be a record of all my travels this year. I’d planned to spend a few weeks at home in Beckenham next week, and we were contemplating a trip to Japan and one to Canada to see the BW, as well as an anticipated trip to sing somewhere in Europe in the autumn. As things stand in a world where a virus pandemic has taken hold, and everything foreseeable is now cancelled, this looks like it’s going to be more warm subtropical colours than temperate blues and greens, as the only temperatures I’ll be recording will be those here in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. With any luck, however, there will be some cooler colours near the other end of this throw for our ski trip to Niseko, now postponed until next February.
The execution:
Above you can see the temperature scale and colours I decided on, going up in intervals of 5C from -5C (think Japan in the snow) to +40C, which is a bit extreme but we regularly have temperatures of 34-35C here in Hong Kong’s humid summer so 40C is not inconceivable. I’m a big fan of bright colours but I tried to tone down the intensity of the oranges and yellow when choosing because all the colours need to work harmoniously next to each other.
Choosing my data source was also problematic. Different sources say different things just here in Hong Kong and even the weather app on my phone sometimes tells me a a different forecast maximum and minumum from what is actually empirically happening outside. In the end I decided to go by the max/min on my watch and to make the decision for the daytime at 12 noon and at 5pm for the night as I figured that would give the observatories plenty of time to revise their data if necessary. I’ll record the data in an online journal every day, just in case I don’t get time to knit the two rows, knit for day and purl for night, always.
I’ve made a start with colours I associate with spring, yellow and pink. Who knows how this blanket will eventually turn out? The unpredictability is really quite exciting. I’m going to take a photo and make notes of my progress each month. Let’s see what happens!