Warmer World Scarves

What do you do when your days are already full of caring duties and it's a major achievement if you can keep on top of the washing and manage to eat each day? You knit two scarves, each using fifteen colours of course. Welcome to my Warmer World Scarves.

As I told you recently, I've become fascinated by the idea of illustrating Climate Change with coloured stripes. If you do an image search for Show your Stripes and add the word 'climate', you'll see what I mean. 

Now I struggled a bit with the maths for this one. I found the data on this page, Climate at a Glance and I understood that all right. I generated a table of the average annual global temperature for each of the 140 years, from 1880 to 2019. The numbers on my table aren't actual temperatures; what they represent is how far the temperature for each year deviated from the average annual global temperature for the whole of the twentieth century. 

So, if the average temperature for any year was the same as that for the years 1901 - 2000, it would appear as 0º Celsius. The range of numbers on my chart is from -0.46º to 0.99º so I divided them up into fifteen bands, each covering 0.1º ... she says, casually. This is where I got hopelessly confused and had to call in an expert (that would be my mathematician son). I'm fine with positive decimal numbers but when we get to negative numbers I just can't cope. I'd like to blame it on the fact that we didn't go decimal here in the UK until I was ten years old but, in reality, I think it's just me. After all, I had no problems with changing to 'new money' and I happily work with both imperial and metric weight measurements - metric for knitting, imperial for cooking and weighing babies.

Anyway, once I'd wrestled my data into fifteen numbered bands, then came the fun part of assigning them each a colour. Back into my comfort zone again. I used my trusty Stylecraft Special DK and the colour pegs I use to plan my designs. I wanted the negative numbers to be shades of blue and the positive ones to be red but there were five bands below zero and ten above and there just weren't that many reds. So I settled for pinks and reds for the warmer colours.

The original scarf was going to be for my son who started me off on this project and he wanted a really long one (think Tom Baker's Doctor Who). I decided to keep it simple and knit it in garter stitch. To avoid a regular colour blip on one side when changing colours, I worked seven rows for each year stripe so that those blips would appear on both sides. This also had the advantage of sharing the tails of yarn between both edges of the scarf. Because I like number patterns within my designs, I worked on a multiple of seven too - 49 stitches.

The disadvantage of having an odd number of rows is that it's harder to keep track of where you are, so I needed a row counter so I didn't get lost. I ticked off each year as I knitted it and made myself darn in the yarn tails after finishing each decade. 

I absolutely loved knitting this scarf. Despite it's size, I didn't get bored once. Instead, I found it quite meditative as I thought about each year as I knitted it and remembered things that happened, either personally or on a global scale. There was a sort of shiver when I got to World War Two and suddenly switched to warmer colours and as for all those family birthdays ...  Here's the finished scarf.

My son was pleased with his scarf. He wears it wrapped twice round his neck and it looks great. I wanted to include a photo of it being worn but, as I only see him occasionally at a distance of two metres when he drops off shopping ... 

Having finished the scarf, I then set about knitting another one, this time on a smaller scale. I went for multiples of four this time - so four rows per year and 40 stitches on the needle. Having an even number of rows in each stripe would make the colour blips appear all on one side so I made the first row of each stripe a K1. P1 row to hide this. I do like my scarves to look good on both sides. This resulted in a very pleasing stitch pattern with one ridge per year on one side and two on the other. Entirely unplanned but I wasn't complaining.

That band of pink is the seven years of the war, 1939-1945.

I enjoyed the knitting just as much the second time round. If you look closely, you can see that I've added a ruler to the side of the scarf to make it easier to count off the years. It might look more balanced to have this on both edges of the scarves but I couldn't be bothered.

I'm hoping that lots of people will knit their own Warmer World Scarves, using my pattern as a starting point. I'd love to see them at the next Climate Change school strike protests - once it's safe to take to the streets again, obviously. In the meantime, get knitting!