temperature scarf

Bev over at Bev's Country Cottage is doing a temperature scarf-along to help "Manna of Life Soup kitchen" in the Bronx, NY. She has posted suggested color guide and instructions for a temperature  scarf. http://www.bevscountrycottage.com/temp-scarf.html  Note that some numbers appear twice on the chart. You need to decide which group you'll put them in and make a note to yourself so you use the same color each time that number comes up. For example 90 is under 90-100 and also under 80-90. So 90 can be either orange or yellow. Your choice. My personal choice is to do all the 90s in one color, all the 80s in one color etc.

Bev's project is running from May 19, 2017 to October 31, 2017.

[UPDATE: Since I wrote this post (and made my own tempghans) I found this site which will create the list of temperatures for each day automatically. What a time saver! The website is http://weatherghansite.azurewebsites.net/ by Krista Scholdberg]

You might recall that when I did my own temperature afghans I used Wunderground's historical weather search. If you want to make a scarf using the same process, head on over there and get your info. https://www.wunderground.com/history/ 

Here's how I got mine in the form I wanted to use. It's long and some might say complicated. I think I have all the steps here. I've done it so many times, it seems easy to me but writing it, I see it is maybe not intuitive. LOL

I use Microsoft Word. If you don't use Word then the details may not be the same for you.

Go to the Wunderground link above.
Put in your city, state or zip code. A box may come up with suggestions. Choose what you want.
It will give you the temperature for the day's date. Where it says Daily Weekly Monthly Custom, choose custom.
Put in the dates you want to include in your scarf or afghan.
Click on Get History.
Scroll down to Weather History and Observations
Set your cursor to the beginning (the year probably), press the shift key, and scroll down to the end of the history you're viewing. Click on the last day you want to include. That will highlight those days. (Be sure you have the shift key pressed or you'll have to start over.)
Control C to copy what you've highlighted.
Open Microsoft Word and click on new document. Choose blank document.
In Page Layout, choose page orientation and set to landscape. Paste your temperatures in there (Control V).
I used the high temperature for my afghans but you can choose whichever you want. High will be easiest to copy because it is the first column.
Set your cursor to right before the year or the first day you're saving.
While holding down the shift key, scroll to the last day you want, only the column you want, and click at the end. That will highlight that area.
Control C to copy.
Now you can either open a new document or control A to highlight the entire document you just created and then click delete to get rid of that because you don't need it anymore.
Open Notepad. Then Control V to paste the columns you copied into the notepad file.
Each day and temperature will be on a separate line. Get them on the same line. I do this by using tab, delete, then down arrow to go to the next line. I have gotten pretty quick at this.
When that is done, go back to your Word document and set the orientation to portrait. Then copy and paste your Notepad info into your emptied Word document. It will be double spaced.
To make it single spaced, go to Page Layout, Spacing and set to 0.
I put mine in 3 columns which you can do by going to Page Layout, Columns and set to 3.
I also like to number my pages which you do by going to Insert, page numbers.

Now you have the numbers that you need to work with. You're not done yet. LOL You need to determine how much yarn to buy so you need to know how many of each temperature you will have and in what colors you want to work those. This will entail a lot of searches.

I use "find" to search for each number from the 30s to 100 (because that is the range of temps in my area) and it will tell me how many of those it finds. I make note of that. When I know how many of each number I have, I determine how I want to space out the colors.

Tip: If you're making an afghan and doing the entire year, your total rows should be equal to 365 or 366 if a leap year. This tip has helped me to find numbers I missed.

Here's an example of the last sheet of a document when I'm done (not for this scarf but an earlier afghan). I added little pictures of the colors from Knit Picks as that was the yarn I was using.

I guess it's a lot of work and maybe there is some shortcut that I haven't discovered to get it in this workable format, but those are the steps I have taken for each year I've done.

For my afghan, I used sport yarn and a chain of 226. For THAT I could get 25 rows to a skein. For any other combination - worsted yarn, different chain, you'll have to figure out how many rows you can get so you can figure out what to buy.

For this scarf, the chain is 25. You can adjust that to the width you want, of course as it's just straight stitches. You will need much less yarn for a scarf than what was needed for an afghan obviously. But you'll still need 8-11 colors, depending on where you live, what your temps are like, and how much / what part of the year you're documenting.

Remember to account for any edging you want to use.

For my afghan, if a color was used for only one row, I didn't want to have to splice yarn in the middle of the row so if I hit a knot, I had to cut that out and start the row over. That was a personal choice. Since that happened WAY too often, I started winding the balls by hand so I could hopefully feel knots before I got to them and cut them out. This worked well for the most part. Only once did I get a knot I had missed.

I do hope to do a scarf. Not sure if I'll follow the 2017 idea and finish in October or do an earlier year so i can start and finish it more quickly. You can donate as many scarves as you want even if you do the one for this year. Just start several and have them in progress. Then in October you'll have many scarves finished.

Happy crocheting!
Sandie