My 2025 temperature scarf

If you’ve never come across a temperature project before, the idea is simple: assign colours to temperature ranges, then knit or crochet a row each day based on the weather. Over time, you end up with a visual record of the year. Most people make blankets, but I decided on a scarf — partly because it felt more manageable, and partly because I liked the idea of something long and gradual that could quietly grow.

For the data, I used daily readings from Manchester Airport because I love watching the planes fly over my house and it was easy to check. Accuracy? To one decimal place. Convenience? Excellent.

Before starting, I worked out my colour palette and temperature ranges. I’d seen some beautiful pastel rainbow blankets on Instagram, so I used the same shades of Stylecraft Special DK. 

Then came the question of stitch. In single crochet (yes, we use US terms here), it would’ve been long enough to wrap around the planet, so I switched to knitting it in the round with stockinette and added white rows between months. Five-millimetre needles gave me the drape I wanted without the fabric looking like Swiss cheese.

The seamless colour changes were… a journey. Knitting in the round meant I wanted the transitions to look clean, which required some experimenting, some redoing, and some muttering under my breath. They’re not perfect, but they’re mine.

The biggest challenge was falling behind. “I’ll catch up tomorrow” turned into weeks, then months. At one point I was properly behind, and catching up felt daunting. But watching the colours shift and repeat — heatwaves, cold snaps, and as you can see in the photo below, the classic Manchester “fake spring” represented in blue and green — made it worth it.

It became a relaxing background project, something I worked on at weekends and during Tuesday Dungeons & Dragons sessions, knitting a few rows between dice rolls.

Now that it’s finished, it’s lovely to see the whole year laid out from end to end. Do I wear it? Absolutely not. But it was never really about the scarf — it was about the quiet satisfaction of turning a year into yarn.

Will I make another one? Probably not for a while. I need time to forget how long this one was.