With the proliferation of Temperature Blankets, Temperature Scarves, and even Temperature Amigurumi, I recently came up with the idea of using the same concept to document my daughter's blood sugars.
But, I am getting ahead of myself.
What is a Temperature Blanket? To paraphrase what others have said, the basic concept is that you assign colors to ranges of temperatures - for example, cooler colors for colder temps, warmer colors for the warmer temps. Then during the course of a set period of time, usually a year, you record the temperature of your choice each day; some people choose to use the daily average...other use the high, the low, or just pick a time of day and use that temp. Then, you translate that temp into a color, and crochet (or knit) one row in that color.
The result is a lovely, sometimes garish, project which is unique - no one else will ever be able to duplicate it. Many people used the temps during a year significant to themselves or someone in their lives - the year of a parent's birth, or a child's, or a marriage. Some people added a color for snow, or rain, or sun....the options are endless.
One day I was working on my own temperature blanket - I had decided to do one this year, since the affects of climate change were resulting in very unsettled weather where I live, and temperatures were all OVER the place this winter - when i was thinking about how this concept could be applied to almost anything that could be reduced to numbers - your height as you grown, your body weight, even shoe size! Imagine recording your child's height once a month for 18 years! then crocheting that into a blanket..and gift it on his/her 18th birthday!!
Then it struck me.....Blood Sugar! My 12 year old daughter is a Type 1 Diabetic, and she lives her entire life governed by that 2- to 3-digit number read off of her glucometer. Every minute of every day that number dictates what she eats, does, how she feels.....and in some cases whether or not she goes to school, goes to bed, or goes to the emergency room. We have 2 years of data already from the downloads from her Continuous Glucose Monitor....why can't I translate that into a range of colors and crochet her a blanket that will be uniquely hers?!
To read about the debate over whether or not to do it, please see my previous blog post about this.
Working with my daughter and selecting yarns which would work for this particular project (i.e., the right gauge, affordable, and available in a range of shades of the necessary colors), we picked out colors and I set up my key. I chose to record her blood glucose readings at noon every day. I chose that time because it will allow us to have a great variation - during school days, every other day that's after gym; during the summers that's probably going to be when she's swimming.
These are the ranges I used:
0 to 69
70 to 109
110 to 149
150 to 199
200 to 249
250 to 299
300 to 349
350 to 399
400 to +++
You will no doubt notice that they aren't evenly distributed, at least at the bottom. That was because I was trying to accurately represent the ranges typical for my kid on a routine basis. If one of my readers is interested in setting up their own, my advice is to record the numbers you intend to use first, then see how the numbers break down - if you rarely see anything above, say, 250, then make 250 and above your top number. If you see a lot of lows, break your lower ranges into more divisions...and so on.
My daughter chose purples as her favorite color, but in order to get enough colors to give interest, I suggested combining purples with Teals, which is how we ended up with the colors we used.
I chose a very compact stitch called Moss Stitch - it allows you to do a lot of rows in a small area, because in order to do an entire year, 365 rows in many stitches would be ridiculously large. I then found a pattern online for a ripple using moss stitch, because I wanted something with a little more interest than just straight rows.
Here we have the results of January and February.
I'm very very pleased so far! I figure once we get to summer, and all of the activity my daughter will be engages in, the colors will shift more towards those assigned to the lower ranges. On the other hand, I am very pleased that those sorts of changes are not obvious. I know what colors represent dangerous lows, or dangerous highs, but no one else does...and they aren't obvious - there's isn't one color that is the "ideal", and everything else is wrong...so my daughter won't have a constant reminder when she looks at it that she didn't have perfect BG all the time.
I will continue to post updates on my progress as I work on it through the coming year. I can't wait to see how it all turns out in the end!
jaz
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