Sky Blanket – Completion

You guys, after all of the tracking and counting and working on this blanket for over a year in order to document 365 days of our gorgeous Northern New Mexico skies, I truly couldn’t be happier with the result!

Not only is this simple blanket beautiful and so very warm, but it represents tiny moments taken every single day of my 38th year to reflect on that which is bigger than myself…to pause, to observe, to mark down and record.

Now, while I couldn’t tell you how many skeins of yarn I used, I can tell you that I made many, many trips back to the craft store and was lucky enough to find the same batches of yarn each time, even if only a skein or two at a time (which did, in fact, cause some stress)!

Here’s what each of the colors mean (because I know you’re curious, right?):

• Light blue – clear skies
• Bright blue – clear skies
• Light grey – cloudy
• White with either blue – partly cloudy
• Light grey with either blue – partly cloudy
• Dark grey – rain
• Dark grey with either blue – rain, clear skies
• Fluffy dark grey – heavy rain
• Fluffy dark grey with either blue – heavy rain, clear skies
• Fluffy white – snow

As you can see, we are incredibly blessed here with (usually) well over 300 clear, blue skied days a year .  The sun really is our friend 🙂

However, 2015 was a very wet year for us with more rain than we’ve seen in a very long time which we are all incredibly grateful for after the years and years of droughts we’ve seen.

A couple of notes:

• I tracked the sky each day using the Notes app on my phone and emailed myself a copy every week or so as a backup
• Each day recorded reflects what the sky looked like for the majority of that day
• I miscalculated how big the blanket would be at first, so began making squares to represent each day instead of rows about half way through the year
• The blanket is definitely King Sized! (And yes, I need a bed skirt on the bed…and a frame…a frame would be nice.)
• The exact year represented in the blanket is November 29, 2014 – November 28, 2015
• If I ever do another Sky Blanket (or similar blanket in style), I’ll start with a Granny Square in the middle instead of the simple spiral I started with here
• The only day of the year I recorded differently was our Wedding Day, September 5th, which I recorded with a bit of yellow at each corner in addition to the rain and blue skies we had that day

One thing I hadn’t anticipated throughout the process of working day after day in this project was just how happy Ember would be to see it on the bed!  When she saw the bed all made, she immediately got up on the bed, stood right in the middle, said, “Mama’s blanket!” and danced and jumped and laid down, and played with the stitches and textures of the rows and was just so happy and so sweet about it!

And then I realized that I worked on that blanket for half of her life, of course she was happy to see it completed 🙂

She may have been even happier than I was.

Sweet, sweet girl.

xoxo,
M

P.S. Curious to learn more the process or my experiences?  Go here.