Juggling

No, not that sort of juggling. My son taught himself to juggle years ago (a very useful skill now he's a primary school teacher I always think) but I've never mastered it.

The juggling I'm talking about will be familiar to you all - the sort that involves juggling work, family and all sorts of other commitments. In my case, I'm trying to combine looking after my stepfather (who is getting much stronger now) with designing, housework and music. Oh, and the cats would like me to tell you that I've been neglecting them for months too.

Over the last couple of months, I've had precisely one day off from caring. My daughter had planned to come up and take over for a couple of days recently but then she came down with That Virus so, obviously, couldn't go anywhere. She's better now and my son and I are managing, together with the support of some wonderful professional carers. That would be some of the carers who the government classes as unskilled workers and who are now working as normal to help the most vulnerable people during this crisis. Enough said.

Anyway, the house is a mess and I still haven't had time to pick up my violin but I am managing to get some work done on several designs, swapping them round as the occasion demands. Want to see what I'm doing?

Do you remember me telling you last year about my search for the right colour scheme for a crochet blanket? You can read about it here. Well, I ended up settling for shades of yellow and green, reminiscent of Spring primroses.

I've been making quite a lot of progress with this one lately. I've decided that it needs to be biggish to show off the 3D effect so I'm making 25 of the squares and filling in with lots and lots of long hexagons. So far I've done three out of the five 'rows' and I even know how I'm going to finish off the edge.

Those squares are flush with the rest of the blanket, not laid on top.

I've got another textured crochet design on the go too. This one is, at the  moment, called 'Blooming Flowers'.

Again, I experimented with lots of really quite ugly colour combinations before settling on shades of pink. Not to mention making a lot of lumpy squares; that green border was harder to work out than you might think. Then, when I put the squares together, all that texture was just a bit too much. The yellow sashing is crocheted on to avoid lots of sewing and (hopefully) tones the whole thing down a bit.

I bought some old wooden workbag handles in a charity shop a few years ago - you can read about that particular treasure hunt here - so I'm going to turn my flower squares into a pretty workbag. That panel of twelve squares will be one side of the bag, the other side will be the same and then I'll probably make up the rest with simple stripes.

I'm enjoying working on both of these projects but the thing that's really grabbed me lately is my Climate Change scarf. My son was telling me about Ed Hawkins' Warming Stripes which represent the earth's rising temperature in coloured stripes and I immediately wanted to turn the data into a scarf.

This is my 'first draft' - a long, garter stitch scarf, representing global warming from 1880 to 2019. The data I used takes the global average temperature for the period 1901 - 2000 and then sees how each year's average temperature deviates from this base temperature. There are fifteen colour bands, each one representing  0.1º Celsius; those bands below 0º are shades of blue and those above are pinks and reds. 

As you can see, the scarf illustrates the way our world's temperature has risen over the past 140 years but this has turned out to be a much more exciting project than just that. As I knitted, I found myself thinking about each year as I got to it, remembering global events and also family birthdays. It turned out to be very calming and therapeutic. There were also some interesting surprises along the way. 

There are only five shades of blue and ten of pink / red but for nearly sixty years the scarf is completely blue. Warmer colours start to appear by the 1940s but it's only from the late 1970s onwards that the blues disappear and the rest of the scarf becomes a race through all the pinks and reds.

The first block of pinks in the scarf represents the years 1939 - 1945, the Second World War. This shook me. You can also spot particularly hard winters, like that of 1963-4, when a long patch of pink is followed by a bright blue stripe. I've promised this scarf to my son but he can''t have it until I've taken all the photos I might want for the pattern.

I've now started a shorter version of the scarf, using a slightly different stitch pattern so that you can count the years more easily to read the information in it. I may or may not add ruler-like lines to one edge to mark the years too. Once I've knitted this one, I think I'll work out a pattern for a crochet version too. At the moment I'm calling them 'Warmer World' scarves. What do you think?