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Temperature blanket planner with your city's temperatures

Type your city and year, and get the daily temperatures from NOAA weather stations, a color for every day, a preview of your blanket in rows or granny squares, the yarn you need per color and a printable tracker. Plan next year's blanket the same way: the colors are set from last year and the tracker waits for each new day. Free.

  • 100% free
  • No sign-up
  • Real daily temperatures (NOAA)
  • Printable tracker
Type or paste temperatures yourself

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Click a color in the key to match your yarn. Temperatures: NOAA Global Historical Climatology Network (public data). City list: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).

More for crocheters and knitters

What is a temperature blanket?

A temperature blanket records a year of weather in yarn. You crochet or knit one row (or one square) a day, and the color of each row stands for that day's temperature: blues for cold days, greens for mild ones, oranges and reds for the hottest. At the end of the year you have a blanket that shows the seasons of your town, and a record of the year you made it.

How to plan yours

  1. Type your city or use your location, and pick the nearest weather station from the list. Airport stations have the most complete records.
  2. Pick the year: a past year to make a blanket of a birth year or a wedding year, this year to catch up, or next year to start on January 1.
  3. Choose high, low or average temperatures, °F or °C, a color scheme and how many degrees each color covers. Click any color in the key to change it to your yarn.
  4. Check the yarn: enter how many yards one row takes (crochet a test row and unravel it) and the yards per skein, and the key shows how many skeins of each color to buy.
  5. Download the PDF with the blanket, the color key and a tracker with every date, or the CSV for a spreadsheet.

Choosing temperature ranges

  • 10 °F (or 5 °C) per color is the classic choice: about 10 to 12 colors cover a year in most of the US.
  • Smaller steps (5 °F, 2 to 3 °C) give more colors and suit places where the weather changes little, like coastal California or Florida.
  • The coldest and hottest colors are open-ended, so a record cold day still has a color.

Where the temperatures come from

The daily highs and lows come from NOAA's Global Historical Climatology Network, the official record kept by US weather stations and many stations around the world. They are public data. New days appear a few days after they happen, and a few stations have gaps; days without a reading stay blank on the tracker so you can fill them in from a weather app.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes. No sign-up, no watermark and no limit.

How much yarn does a temperature blanket take?

It depends on the width, the stitch and the yarn. A 50 inch wide blanket in worsted weight single crochet takes very roughly 10 to 15 yards per row, so 365 rows need around 4,000 to 5,500 yards in total. Crochet a test row with your yarn, measure it, and enter it in the planner for your own numbers.

High, low or average?

Most makers use the daily high, because it matches how warm a day felt. Lows give a cooler, darker blanket. Some makers do two rows a day, one for the high and one for the low.

Can I make a blanket for a birth year?

Yes. Choose the year, or choose Custom dates for a birthday-to-birthday blanket, up to 366 days.

My city is outside the US. Does it work?

Often, yes: the network includes thousands of stations in Canada, the UK, Australia and elsewhere. If no station is found, type the temperatures yourself in the box under the settings.

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