#yearly project

Keeping organized for a project like this is super important. Before the pandemic my work schedule was kind of all over the place and I don’t always have time to work on this project. However Keeping a log of the temperature for each day helps so that later on when I have some spare time I can work on a weeks worth of rows at one time. 

So at the top left of my log is my color key for each set of temperatures. Because where I live we never really get below freezing I set my coldest temp to 49 and below. And I know in the summer we do hit low triple digits so I set my Highest to 100+. I didn’t wanna have to many color sections I wanted to keep to under 10 so I split them into sections by 10′s. This can be customized to where you live and how you want to tackle this project. 

Under that I started to list out the dates for each month so I’d have somewhere to keep a log of the daily temperatures. As Im writing this it is April 19th and as you can see in the log I only have temperatures logged till April 12th. This is where the internet can help you out. 

I use https://www.wunderground.com/ to look up the average temperatures for the days I didn’t get to log. This website has a very easy to use clean layout and you can filter by month. I go off the high for the day in my log. You can choose to go off the high. low, or average.  

Now on the right page I have notes Ive made about my pattern. When working on a year long patten it’s likely that you wont remember everything later on after a few months. So I mad a note of how many starting chains I used, so that after a few rows I can count my stitches and make sure Im not missing anyone or haven’t added too many. I also made note of the hook size. There was a moment that I ran out of a color and had to wait for the yarn to be mailed before I could continue. When the yarn arrived it had been a couple weeks because of my notes I knew I was using a 5mm hook and a moss stitch. I even made notes on how to do the moss stitch as a refresher. 

Under that I started to log how many rows of each color I was doing. Like I said before  there was a moment when I ran out of one of my colors. So with logging how many rows of each color Im doing Im able to see how much of what color I may run out of soon so I can keep up with ordering. And on a side note, when I started this project I would save the paper wrap on the yarn with a few wraps of the color in came off of. This serves two purposes, the first being when I go to reorder the yarn I know the name brand and color along with dye lot. This is important because some dye lots can be a little off, it’s not a perfect science. Secondly having a yard or two of spare yarn once the project is done is nice just in case a stitch breaks or any part of the blanket needs repair. 

So far this project is been super fun and Im excited to see how it turns out. 

In 2016 the year’s project was a word of the day poem, and in 2017 it was obviously daily haikus.

I had a hard time deciding what to do for 2018, but I finally came up with doing a line a day on a giant year long poem.

Originally they will all be in separate posts so if you want to keep up you might have to collect them! But at the end of each month I’ll collect up the lines and post them as their own poem.

They’ll also all be tagged with Line A Day 2018 so that they’ll be fairly easy to find if you miss one.

I hope you guys will enjoy this project as much as I probably (hopefully) will!