Temperature blanket planner
Pick your town and year. The planner pulls in real daily temperatures, suggests colour bands, works out the yarn for each colour and keeps track of every row.
Updated
Choose a place to load its daily temperatures.
Colour key
| Colour | Temperature | Yarn colour | Days | Yarn | Remove |
|---|
Blanket size and yarn (for the yarn column)
Your blanket
Day-by-day tracker
Temperatures: NASA POWER (NASA Langley Research Center POWER Project, funded through the NASA Earth Science/Applied Science Program). Place search © OpenStreetMap contributors. Your blankets are saved in this browser only.
How to make a temperature blanket
- Choose your place and year. Most people start on 1 January, but any year from 1981 works.
- Choose daily high, average or low. Daily highs are the most popular and give the widest spread of colours.
- Set your colour bands. The planner suggests bands that fit your town's temperatures. Change the colours to match yarn you can buy, and type in each yarn's name.
- Buy the yarn. The key shows roughly how many days fall in each band, and how much yarn that means for your blanket size.
- Work one row a day. Mark each row done in the tracker, and the next row's colour is waiting for you.
Tips
- Pick a simple stitch you can work without a pattern: garter or moss stitch for knitting, half double or moss stitch for crochet.
- Keep the width manageable. 365 rows add up. At about 0.2 in (5 mm) per row, a year is about 6 ft (1.8 m) long, so choose a narrower width or a thinner yarn if that's too big.
- Buy each colour from one dye lot so a colour doesn't change halfway through the year.
Common questions
What is a temperature blanket?
A blanket knitted or crocheted one row (or square) per day for a year, where each row’s colour shows that day’s temperature. By the end of the year it is a picture of the weather where you live.
How many colours do I need for a temperature blanket?
Most makers use 8–12 colours, one per temperature range of about 5°C or 10°F. Fewer colours make a calmer blanket; more colours show the weather in more detail. The planner suggests bands that fit your town’s range.
Where do the temperatures come from?
From NASA’s POWER project, which publishes daily temperatures for every place on Earth from 1981 onwards. Figures are averaged over an area about 50 km across, so they can differ by a degree or two from your local weather station, especially by the sea or in the mountains. You can type in your own reading for any day.
Why is yesterday’s temperature missing?
Each day’s figure usually arrives 3–4 days later. Many makers work a few days behind for that reason, or type the temperature in from a local forecast.
Can I make a temperature blanket for a past year?
Yes. Pick any year from 1981 on: a birth year, wedding year or graduation year all make lovely gifts. The whole year’s temperatures load at once.
Is my progress saved?
Yes, in this browser on this device. Use the same browser each day. The share link copies your plan (place, year and colours) but not your progress.