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I am one of the many people who took up crocheting early on in the pandemic. I was in lockdown with a sick roommate and spent feverish hours working on my first-ever crochet beanie to pass the time — a project that ended up looking a lot more like a funnel than a hat due to my refusal to count stitches.
I’ve gotten a lot better in the years since then. I, at least, can make a wearable hat. But what I didn’t expect was for this art form to intersect with the focus of my work as an environment reporter — and for this year to be the year that I and others at CapRadio begin creating a station temperature blanket, one whose progress we’ll document throughout the year.
Temperature blankets, as a concept, aren’t brand new, but I’ve seen a surge of interest in them on social media in recent years. People documenting daily temperature averages through the creation of a knit or crochet blanket frequently share their journeys on TikTok or Instagram.
The exact style can vary but often, the people making these blankets crochet a new row of their project each day, choosing different colored thread to represent the day’s average temperature — like an icy blue for temperatures in the 20s, or a deep red for temperatures in the 90s. At the end of the year, they’re left with a colorful tapestry that tells the story of changing temperatures throughout the year.
Manola Secaira's patented funnel hat.Manola Secaira/CapRadioIn recent years, these blankets have been used to artistically illustrate changing temperatures due to climate change. One group in particular, the Tempestry Project, has been a leader in this effort. The New York-based founders have sent out kits or offered tips for people interested in making temperature blankets since they started the group shortly after Donald Trump was elected as president.
At the time, the two founders — fiber artist Emily McNeil and data scientist Asy Connelly — had seen a movement to preserve climate data emerge. They joked that maybe they could start something, some sort of project where this data could be kept safe in perpetuity.
But what was once a joke quickly became a reality; they spent months writing patterns and designing an official color system for their temperature blankets.
The project took off shortly after and, Connelly said, interest in projects like theirs seems to only increase as the years go by.
“Lately, the climate is getting harder to ignore,” said Connelly. “It feels like we've kind of started transitioning into … awareness, but also catharsis and a way for people to channel their anxiety into something creative and beautiful.”
McNeil said their approach personalizes climate change for people.
“It's not abstract anymore,” she said. “It's become personal for everyone [and] now it's more of a communal sharing of what people are going through.”
This can get time consuming — but not if you have the right people to help out.
Claire Morgan, avid fiber artist and digital editor at CapRadio, approached me in early January about what it would look like to team up and create our own temperature blanket. It’s easy to feel, on a hot summer day, that it’s the hottest day of your life. But what would it be like to really track that, to compare personal observation with what temperature records tell us?
“Being able to observe and create a graph is one thing, but to actually be able to physically interact with the data … I have so much more connection to that data and that information, and I feel like I understand it more deeply,” Claire told me.
To make it a little more manageable, we’ve decided to crochet a square whose color showcases the average temperature of a week in Sacramento (instead of a day) and offer regular updates. That’s 52 squares for the year. By the end, we’re hoping to have our own blanket to give us a snapshot of our local climate.
To be clear: These averages aren’t enough on their own to tell us what’s happening with climate change. That’s a much bigger picture. But recent studies have told us that the number of record-breaking heat events are on the rise, outnumbering record-breaking cold events. Californians regularly see local heat records broken each year.
We hope the practice of creating this blanket can help make us more aware of when things are a little different; if temperatures spike earlier than typical or if any records associated with them are broken, we’ll take note.
If you’re interested in following our journey, we’ll be providing regular updates with photos in this story and in our newsletter, SacrameKnow.
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