In June we found out we’re expecting our 6th child. (We found out in October that it’s going to be another girl.) I thought this would be a good opportunity to test out a pattern I had been eyeing for a temperature blanket. I know that there are quite a few people that don’t want to have a huge project. That’s why I’ve been on the lookout for smaller patterns. So I figured I would make a pregnancy temperature blanket to track the temperatures for this pregnancy. As a bonus I’ll have a baby blanket for the new baby shortly after she’s born.
The Pattern
The pattern I’m using isn’t my own pattern. I’m adapting a pre-existing one into a temperature blanket pattern. When I’ve finished my blanket I’ll write out my adaptation.
A while ago I bought a book of patterns called Blue Ribbon Afghans from America’s State Fairs. It has patterns from blankets that won blue ribbons at the various state fairs around the US. One pattern, Baby Rings, caught my eye and got my temperature blanket brain thinking. The book is apparently out of print (see the My Favorite Resources page for more on that), but you can find the pattern in the Mile-A-Minute Baby Blankets crochet pattern book (affiliate link) on the Annie’s Attic website.
What’s nice about the pattern is it’s done one panel (one month to me) at a time. So by the end of the blanket all you really have to do is a little bit of an edging. That and doing just a really small bit each day makes it a good blanket to work on while pregnant (and all the sickness and weariness that can mark that time).
How I’m Adapting It
Funny enough I actually began thinking about adapting it for a pregnancy blanket before I got pregnant. So when I got pregnant it seemed a good time to test it out. Then I wouldn’t need to dig up temperatures from my last pregnancy, which wasn’t full term anyway. (I’m of course crossing my fingers that this one will be.)
The blanket is made in panels as I mentioned before. In the original pattern there are 7 panels. Since a full term pregnancy lasts 10 months I figured each panel could be one month so I will need to add 3 panels. Also, there were originally 30 rings in each panel, which is easy to adapt to 31 rings for 31 days.
I had a bit of a dilemma when I tried to figure out if I wanted the months to be calendar months or the months of the pregnancy. After some research I figured out that the months of the pregnancy were even more inconsistent than calendar months. So calendar months it is.
Yarn and Colors
I decided to branch out a bit with the yarn for this blanket. Since this is a smaller blanket I figured I could use a bit more expensive of a yarn and it still work out to not be expensive. The winning yarn was Red Heart With Love.
The pattern called for a varigated yarn, so I picked that one first. My eye was drawn to the Waterlily colorway. The other colors I picked to match that one. As you can see below I didn’t pick any sort of rainbow colors. I also felt I needed a neutral color. Tan wasn’t what I wanted, so I picked Light Grey for that.
For this blanket I really didn’t want to have very many colors. I’m pretty happy with the number of colors I picked mostly because it means I don’t have to carry around a lot of different skeins. Since there are so few colors the ranges are really wide, making it only necessary to use two or three in a month. I was a little worried about having so many days with the same color, but I actually don’t mind how it looks after I finished May.
My Experiences So Far
I’ve already finished the first panel for the blanket. It was quite the learning experience and I’m not super happy with the way it looks. I really don’t want to re-do it however, so I’m going to let it go for now.
Some problems I’ve had:
- I think I didn’t feed the yarn through the rings the same way each time so some of them seem wonky
- It would make things easier if you either don’t weave in the ends on each ring or mark the join as you go
- Some of the rings seemed to be different sizes which annoyed me but I wasn’t sure how to fix it short of measuring every single ring
- I felt it was cheating a bit to start the temperatures when I wasn’t actually pregnant yet, but that’s just how pregnancies are figured
- I had to take a ring out when I realized that when I started on the 16th I needed to only do 15 filler rings
Have you ever tried to do a similar pattern?
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3 thoughts on “Pregnancy Temperature Blanket”
I have some pictures of a baby afghan made with those rings along with some instructions in an email I sent to myself a while back. I don’t remember where on the internet I found them. Viewing them might help you to figure out how to make the rings straight. Send me an email if you are interested.
If being careful with how I thread them through next time doesn’t help, I’ll for sure take you up on that.
Thanks!