Temperature Wall Hanging

Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time is to make a temperature wall hanging. Temperature quilts, if you aren’t familiar with them, are made to track the temps of a specific time period. Usually they are for a year. They are a great way to see visually how temperatures have changed. If you want more information, just google “temperature quilts” and you will see all types.

I decided that I wanted to track how the climate has changed since I was born. I decided to work with the temps from my birthdays. So, when I’m done, I’ll have 71 blocks that will show the temps for those birthdays.

The very first thing is to go to Weather Underground, find your city, and then get the temps for your time period.

Now it’s time to decide what fabrics to use, and to assign each fabric to a specific temperature range – usually a 5-degree span. I took out my dyed fabric and laid them out.

Now to get serious and make a color chart. I put my birthday temps in a spreadsheet. For each year I list the high, the low, and the average for that day. Below you see my chart. The numbers under the temps are the amount of each color I’ll need.

So here were my fabric and the color chart.

But of course, I can’t make it easy. I think I need to low immersion dye some more fabric. I had this tablecloth I had purchased at the local thrift store awhile back. I decided to go ahead and dye it all of the colors. They turned out so pretty.

Then I remembered this soft fabric Dawn had given me. So I dyed it. Here are just a few of the colors.

Next to decide the actual block size and style, and which fabrics would make up this block containing the high and low temperature. I auditioned all of the fabric combinations to see what I liked.

 

I loved the tablecloth fabric, but it was too busy. The dyed fabric was nice, but boring. So I decided I wanted to go with the soft fabric for the whole block. I also wanted to get away from a square. My blocks will be a rectangle with the high temp at the top over the low temp. I’m still debating whether I’ll add in the average temp. Here is my start. Since I only dyed a little of that soft fabric, I still need to dye a few more pieces.

And just a little progress. Not sure how these are going to end up.

While waiting on the newly dyed fabric to be washed out and dried, I looked through some of my sun printed fabric. I got so excited about the piece below that I’ll be sewing it up soon. Just for fun, I sewed up a few tissue holders from other sun printed fabric.

I hadn’t used my sewing machines for several months. I want to use my zigzag on the temperature wall hanging. I sat down to use it and we started to fight. Ms Elna won and I ended up taking her in for service since the zigzag quit working. What is great is that I’m feeling like creating again!

Thanks for dropping by. Hope you can do some creative this week.