A year’s weather in crochet – an update

In February this year (2021) I wrote about how I was making a temperature scarf.

Basic idea: crochet a line of wool for every day of the year, representing the weather in various colours (red for a hot day, blue for rain – that sort of thing).

I am sure that some readers thought: I wonder how long she’ll be doing that?

And indeed I wondered the same thing. Projects like these often fall by the wayside as real life rolls on.

However, I am pleased to report that my “scarf” is still going strong. I am up to date and strongly into the colours of mid-winter.

There have been some hiccups.

The process has revealed that I am really terrible at keeping to a straight edge when doing crochet, so the first six months of the scarf start out narrow and get wider over the months, meaning that my scarf now looks a bit like an ice-cream cone.

I took it on holiday with me and lost my favourite crochet hook between the slats of a wooden deck.

Then I discovered that the original colours I picked for rain simply did not do justice to full vagaries of Cape Town weather, so I’ve added another shade of blue.

And the scarf got very long and cumbersome to work with so I finished off the last day of June and started a new six-month section.

But it is still going!

Lessons learned

I think that’s because I ditched perfectionism at the outset. I resolved that I would not go back and unpick for any reason except a mistake in the data. If I somehow got my colours mixed up, that would have to be fixed. But anything else (dropped stitches, peculiar lumps in the edges, dirty bits of wool, cats attacking strands and making a mess) would just have to be left behind as I crocheted on.

I am endlessly fascinated by the way the colours unfold. I am recording three sets of data: the highest temperature of any given day (in shades from pale lemon to red), the wind (in shades of green) and rain (in shades of blue). The first six months are to the right.

And I love the way the wool makes a graphic representation of actual events. Here, the red wool represents the hottest day of the year so far (36 deg C) – and also the day of the terrible Cape Town fire.

I don’t think I’ll ever wear this as a scarf. But I have been wrapping the first six months around my shoulders against the chilly Cape Town weather in my icebox of an office. It got down to 1 deg C last night. I wonder if next year’s scarf needs to record low temperatures as well?

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