Category: Crafting

2025 is done!* 2026 projects are progressing!

OK, the * is because I still have the border to finish on the 360-day granny square blanket I started in mid-February 2025. The final day in that count fell during Capricon, so I finished the squares, adding the squares to the row, and then attaching the row to the overall blanket after we got home from the convention. I have started the border using the same gradient white to black yarn that I used to join, knowing that I have an unstarted skein still. My approach at the moment is to get a row of single crochet around the entire blanket – which lengthwise stretches across the sofa – and then determine whether I have enough yarn for a fancier second row.

The 2026 blanket is definitely less of a time investment than the 2025 one – each link, even with my February decision to start on the border as I add each link, which helps orient them correctly, takes 10 minutes or less. I’m super excited about how this will look once I’ve connected multiple months. That part has to wait until the full month is finished, since there’s a second row on the border that can’t be added until the entire month is complete. I can’t even make the filler links – 3 gray ones for February – until I finish out the month, since they connect in as they’re crocheted.

The temperature tree is also progressing nicely. I feel like each day takes longer than this year’s blanket, but that may be inaccurate. I still have to think about what I’m doing for the embroidery, which is mostly not the case for the daily links I’m crocheting. I can multitask the daily crocheted project while watching or listening to something, which probably gives me impression that it’s going faster than it really is.

Overall, these are both fairly quick daily projects, so I have started another (side? main?) crochet project as well. That’s a gift, so it won’t show up here until it’s been handed to the recipient. Actually, that’s the case for a couple upcoming projects, so there may be some project photo dumps later in the year.

Or happy Halloween, depending which you celebrate. Both is, of course, an option. As we wrap up the harvest season, at least those of us in northern climates that are rapidly moving towards winter, we celebrate the shifting seasons with Samhain, taking the opportunity to mourn our losses at this point in the year when the veil between the living and spirit world is considered to be at its thinnest.

In the United States, we also celebrate Halloween, a holiday that has derived from Samhain and similar celebrations. While Halloween parties usually fall on the weekend that precedes the holiday, whatever day of the week Halloween falls traditionally sees children donning costumes and going door-to-door trick-or-treating, requesting goodies (typically candy) from their neighbors. Many towns now have designated trick-or-treating hours, usually ranging a couple hours before and after sunset; our hours are 4-8pm, with a 5:50pm sunset.

We live in an area of town where trick-or-treating is light: the yards are reasonably wide, and there are no sidewalks or street lights, all of which discourage families from wandering our block. We usually see a handful of people before dark and that’s it. That is not, in my mind, worth buying a large bag of candy for, since we would then need to eat the remainders. Instead, I have a box of toys I set on a table by the front door with a “please take one” sign. These toys keep easily between years – unlike chocolate – and can be added to when the box starts to run low.

Though it’s not running low yet, I wanted to experiment with crocheting a ghost this year. And once I had made a couple of those, I wanted a spider – a pattern I’ve crocheted before – and threw together a couple Frankenstein monsters as well. Other than the spider, these aren’t stuffed… in terms of shape, they’re essentially upside down pots, holding themselves up on the weight of the yarn. Hopefully they’ll be enjoyed by the small number of people who wander by our house.

The temperature blanket continues, of course, with another three months of warm weather added in the latest six rows. In this photo, that’s the left side, which has the occasional yellow (65-74) with more orange (75-84) and red (85-94). Fortunately, dark red’s only appearance, for temperatures 95 and above, was on the last travel day shown, when we flew back from Portland, Oregon as they started a heat wave.

When I started this blanket, I was working on the concept based solely on word-of-mouth, having heard the idea from friends at various points, including one who started her blanket in January. I recently stumbled on a Temperature/Weather Blanket group on Facebook and am in awe of the variety of different ideas for the same basic concept. Beyond the basic rows or granny squares (like mine) are the expanded ideas with lows and highs, sometimes as half of the same row, which makes for fascinating color blends. There are rows or squares as month dividers, special colors or add-ons to mark significant dates for the blanket’s owner (not necessarily the person doing the work), and squares per week or month, building out to longer rows later in the square. And it’s not all squares! There are hexes and flowers and circles all joined in appropriate ways. One layout I’m considering for the future is a calendar design – in addition to the squares for each day, there are filler squares to finish out the rectangle for a monthly calendar, along with a top row indicating the month, and then the months can be joined to form the larger blanket.

And that’s just the blankets! There are also weather snakes… same basic concept, a row per day of a crochet plush snake, which I have to say, is tempting for some future year. There are also embroidered designs, from a dozen cat silhouettes in a variety of colors to a daily temperature tree, which is available as a kit here. I am seriously considering that one for 2026, as a good way to improve my embroidery skills. Once I have more practice, I may consider an embroidery chart for something like the cats.

Which creative temperature idea fascinates you the most?

Progress continues on my temperature blanket, with over a hundred squares already connected. That’s more than a quarter of the blanket completed! We are stuck in a bit of a weather rut recently, though Sunday’s forecast offers the possibility of a color change after two weeks in the red (85-94) range. It looks like I’ll get to sneak a couple orange squares in soon.

Even with gardening, I’ve never watched the forecast this closely. For the garden, once it’s planted, I mostly need to know when to expect rain, both to know if I need to water (this summer, the answer to that is mostly yes) and plan my outside time. With overnight temperatures dropping to the high 60s and low 70s, the early mornings are perfect for weeding and mulching on days when it’s not raining. Those overnight drops are why I’m contemplating doing a lows and highs blanket the next time I make a temperature blanket, to really showcase the quirks to our Midwest weather.

What the hell was I thinking?

When I started the sculpture for this year’s Tiny Art Exhibit at the local library, my intention was to use some of the clay to make something that looked like weaving. As I started assembling the pieces, I changed my mind – the instructions said we could use other materials besides the ones provided, which in this case were white and black foam clay, and tan (normal?) air-drying clay. I’ve never worked with the foam stuff before, it was weirdly poofy, and I didn’t think I could replicate a weaving pattern with it. Shaping a human-ish body was difficult enough.

‘Ah-ha!’ I thought. ‘I have toothpicks and embroidery thread! And I did take like two weaving lessons in middle school.’

I was already committed to this plan before I remember that my weaving lessons involved the actual weaving rather than setting up the warp to work on. And my goodness, toothpicks are tiny. Setting up the warp was a bit aggravating, the weaving less so once I found a rhythm to it. Since my intended title was “Weaving her next story,” I knew when I started that I didn’t need to fill the entirety of the warp, just enough to show some color variations… you know, show that it’s actual weaving.

I love how this turned out and have dropped it at the library already. That said, I do not recommend weaving on a toothpick loom… pick a large template.

45 (connected) days in, I effectively have a usable shawl as I work on my temperature blanket.

I’m actually 47 days into it, but as you can see in the photos, 2 of those squares aren’t connected to the rest. I connect each square to the previous day when I finish it, and when I complete a row of 15, I connect it to the other rows.

You may be wondering why a couple of the squares have more than one color. I decided at the beginning that I wanted the blanket to reflect where I was – rather than my home address – for each day. The multi-color squares reflect the highs for travel days, where there was a difference between my starting and ending locations, with the added bonus that one of them ended up with my university’s colors. Specifically, those are for our trip to Florida for a cruise at the beginning of March. I suspect travel in winter or summer will have less temperature variance than our spring trip did.

What’s that? Well, crocheting is when you use a single hook… oh, you mean a Temperature Blanket? It’s when you crochet a little bit each day based on the current temperature, or specifically (in this case), the day’s high temperature at my current location. I had heard about the concept years ago, and was considering starting one this year, but the last couple months have been kind of hectic (something about co-chairing a convention…). But someone told me that a Temperature Blanket doesn’t have to start on January 1st, so when I learned that JoAnn Fabrics is closing the three stores closest to me, I rushed out to pick up some yarn.

OK, not quite rushed out. I wanted to know how much yarn I needed to buy first… we have more days in the 70s than in the 20s, and only a handful of super hot days, and I wanted to know by how much. I pulled temperature data for the last year for Rosemont into a spreadsheet, used the mround function to round up or down to the nearest 10, and created a pivot table to count the occurrences. Yes, that’s a super geeky approach to yarn shopping.

Based on those numbers, I determined to buy 1, 2, or 3 skeins of yarn, as appropriate, with some loosely set colors. I know from experience that color selection varies, especially when trying to find multiple colors in the same or similar yarns. Then I went shopping – the only change was picking up a gradient white & blue for 30, because there wasn’t a white available in that yarn, and I flipped the blue and light blue because there was only one skein available for the darker color. (Caron Simply Soft, for reference. Which is, in fact, fabulously soft.) I also picked up a joining color (gradient black & white), having already decided I would be crocheting squares.

After shopping, I grabbed a spare piece of cardboard, punched 11 holes into it, and looped a snippet of each yarn by the appropriate temperature. Because I’m using the mround function, 10 really means anywhere from 6 to 15, and so on for the ranges. I created a tracking sheet where I enter each day’s temperature, set up a vlookup against my color guide, and track when it’s done. If I miss a day or two, I’ll have the data saved and can mark as I catch up.

I picked a granny square pattern that starts from the center and works out (which is why I needed a joining yarn). While searching for that pattern, I spotted another one that starts with a more obvious circle in the center before expanding to a square – that might be fun some other year for a lows and highs temperature blanket, since we do get wide ranges some days. I also trimmed the pattern down to three rounds instead of the five it comes with, realizing that I’m making either 360 or 375 of these squares (for rows of 15)… at 3.5 inches, that builds up pretty quickly.

I will admit it’s hard to only crochet today’s square. Yes, I could look at the forecast and crochet ahead, but what if it shifts? A predicted 14 can easily become a 16, which is an entirely different color! It’s a practice in patience. I’m sure I’ll share some progress photos later in the year.

There are people – presumably with skills – that make a living from their drawings, paintings, and other artistic presentations. Some are serious, some comic, some downright absurd (especially what people will pay for them). I am not one of those people.

I have a day job I enjoy, along with assorted creative hobbies, from crocheting to writing, that I occasionally present in a way that could supplement my income. Drawing and painting, however, are activities that I do simply for fun, or to extricate a stuck idea from my head.

The butterfly below, for example, is another iteration of Andrea Nelson’s activities that present a focus image divided into smaller sections for coloring. In this particular case, drawn and painted on Christmas Eve, I decided that the butterfly should be painted in red and green. For contrast, I selected blue and purple as the background colors.

The process itself was fun, just sitting and painting for a while on a relaxing day off. The naming process can be fun too… I call this image The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Ate the Christmas Decorations.

For myself, art is not a progression of skill – though there is a bit of that happening. Rather, it’s been a progression of appreciation for the creative process, knowing that whatever the result looks like, I had fun making it.