Pinch, punch, first of the month

Ok so it is now the 3rd but that's not such bad going, only a couple of days late. It's been a busy week this week with both work and college in the evenings.

This is a little post about a year long project that I started in January but have not yet told you about.

Over the winter we have started (& almost finished!) having our kitchen decorated. I will show you how it looks when it is fully finished but the basic idea is that the walls have been re-plastered and painted white, we're having new wood cladding around the bottom of the walls in the dining room half of the room (not done yet) and we've had new tiles around the kitchen above the worktop a. The tiles are mostly white but we have had a few random coloured tiles placed around in between to brighten things up a little and to match the colours of our plates etc.

With this in mind, knowing that this was going to be the year that the kitchen was decorated and finished, I decided that something I would like to make is a table runner for our dining table in there - something that we hope to be able to use a lot more than we currently do, once the rest of the kitchen is finished.

I saw last year as I was making the crochet "mood" blanket, someone had had the idea to make a blanket based on the temperature where they lived. This was in an area with a much more varied climate than ours here in England but I hoped that somehow I would be able to make this work.

I decided to use Patons 100% cotton 4ply yarn (the same as I used to make the Christmas table runner with that I made a couple of years ago) as I liked how this felt for this runner before. It is not too soft to become a table runner, it holds its shape well enough to run down the centre of a table and comes in enough colours to create the effect that I am after.

The table runner would require me to crochet one row per day with the colour chosen dependant on the temperature that day. I felt that this would be much more manageable than the crochet squares that I tried to do last year (I got up to about April/May with the blanket last year and then fell so far behind that it just became completely unreasonable to even try to catch up). With the blanket being based on what happened each day and to some extent, mood, there was also a fair few bad days towards the end of last year, this did not provide me with any incentive to try to complete this either.

So temperatures should be more reliable. There would be no doubt of the colour to be used and just 1 row per day would be manageable to maintain even if I were to get a few days behind for any reason (hence this post coming on the 3rd April instead of the 1st.

I have chosen the following colours for this blanket (again to match the colours of the mugs/plates that we have): red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue and purple. I will also use white as a separating colour.

These colours correspond to the following temperatures:

Dark blue - less than or equal to 0*C

Light blue - 1-5

Purple - 6-10 (this didn't end up in the traditional rainbow sequence as I was only able to get 1 ball of the dark blue yarn as opposed to 2 of each of the others and I assumed that the coldest temperatures would be too rare for my liking in England)

Green - 11-15

Yellow 16-20

Orange 21-15

Red 25+ (possibly wishful thinking but we will have to wait for tht summer months in order to find out!)

In order to try to utilise the full range of colours throughout the years, I will choose each day's lowest temperature for the winter months (January. February & December), each day's highest temperature for the summer months (June, July & August) and for all of the months in between I will take an ever age of the 2.

Here is the first 3 months of my runner.

I started with 2 rows of white, just to form an edging and then continued with 1 row per day in the relevant colour, depending on that day's temperature. I have also added 1 row of white in between each month just to show the separation in the colours. I thought that when I switched between my methods of deciding the colour (low, mid or high) this might look a bit strange without the distinction between the months to show where this change had occurred.

From this we can see that the start of the year was not too cold, however the temperature really dropped towards the end of January, beginning of February. March is when I changed from using the low temperature to the middle temperature and hence I had my first rows of green starting to crop up. Green is definitely the warmest that I have got to so far. This could be v different if I were now using the high temperature for each day but is keeping the colours fairly evenly spread so far.

I am hoping that the runner will start with the blue and purple colours get up to reds and oranges in the middle and then fall back to blues and purples at the other end. I think that this should go really well in our newly decorated kitchen and really look forward to having this on display from the beginning of next year. The only downside on using the temperature method for choosing the colours is that you can never really get ahead at all as I need to check the confirmed temperatures online before completing the day before's row.

Also today was the first day that I found one flower in the display I made last week that had started to wilt ever so slightly. Luckily I was given a few spare flowers to bring home at the end of the course last week so this pink rose was easily replaced by a purple coloured one to maintain the balance of the display. The lilies have started to open now as well so this is really starting to fill out and show itself to its full potential.

I hope that you are all having a lovely start to your bank holiday weekend and I will check in again in the next couple of days with how the final Easter decorations and celebrations turn out.