What is a Temperature Quilt and How Do I Make One?

Temperature Quilts have become quite popular in the last few years, and regardless of climate, fabric choice or block pattern, they all turn out stunningly beautiful, so of course I had to make one myself.

A temperature quilt is made by creating a range of temperatures and assigning one fabric to each set of numbers.  Here in Seattle, it is rarely colder than freezing, and even more rarely hotter than 100*.  I set my range for one fabric for everything below 32*, and then each fabric covered 4 degrees all the way up to 100* for 19 fabrics total.

You then take the fabric for the high temperature of the day and the fabric for the low temperature of the day, and make a quilt block with just those two fabrics.  Keep your blocks small, you are going to have 365 of them, after all!

These are just a few of the many block choices you can use for a temperature quilt.

The common way of doing the temperature quilt is to do the current year, starting January 1^st and then adding each day until December 31^st.  I decided that rather than the current year, I would get old weather data and do the year I was born.  I have a January birthday, so my quilt will still have the colder winter colors along the top and bottom and the warmer summer temperatures in the middle as if I was doing the current year.  Who knows, 2019 may turn out to be the most significant year of my life and I may regret not documenting it, but I decided to go with 1981.  My end-of-the-month birthday has the added benefit that I can add my two January blocks to my 28 February blocks and solve the problem of February being a shorter column than all the rest of the months.

I love, love, love the Blueberry Park fabric line by Karen Lewis, and it comes in a full rainbow of colors, so it was really easy for me to pick fabric for this quilt.  Less easy was acquiring the fabric.  This line came out a few years ago, and is no longer available in any quilt shops near me.  So, I bought my fabric online.  Only, like I said before, this fabric line is not new, lots of places have sold out of some of the prints, so I actually shopped at THREE different shops.   Waiting for the fabric to arrive was agony!  I mean, not really, waiting on the mailman is a first world problem.  But it did take longer than I wanted.

Finally, my rainbow of fabric arrived.  Woo hoo!  As I sorted the fabrics from different packages into a rainbow, I realized I didn’t like all the fabrics.  This one was far more orangey red than coral, and really didn’t go with the rest of the colors.

This blue was more gray than blue.  I should have known, it’s called Fog.

I had intentionally picked 20 fabrics when I knew I only needed 19 colors, but removing those two left me with 18.  I REALLY didn’t want to continue shopping online and waiting for more delivery.

This is where using past weather data is a bit of an advantage over future (and unknown!!) temperatures.  I can see that Redmond, Washington only hit 100* once in 1981.  I decided to change my temperature chart to only need 18 fabrics.  Just like I have all fabrics under 32* assigned to one fabric, I will have all temperatures 96* and higher have just one fabric.  Let’s be honest.  This is Seattle.  There is no air conditioning.  96* is equally as miserable as 100*.  It’s fine to have them share a fabric. 

I have a feeling this quilt is going to be mostly green and teal.  45-55 is a very common low temperature throughout the late spring, early summer and fall, as well as a very common high temperature throughout the late fall, winter and early Spring.  I think I’ll be using a lot of the colors assigned to those temperatures.

So now I’ve got my fabric, I’ve got each fabric assigned to a temperature, and I’m ready to get this quilt started!

Here is the first full week of my life!

All those little half square triangles on the right hand side are the scraps made by trimming the block- directions coming in just a few paragraphs – keep reading! I am determined to be smart about scraps this year, and to clean out the scrap bin! I don’t know yet what these will become, but so far they will blend perfectly with a lot of my scraps from last year, so I’m hanging on to them.

You want to make a temperature quilt now too, don’t you? You should!

A temperature quilt can be made with any type of small block with two colors, there are a whole bunch of block ideas back near the top of the post. To make blocks like mine, start with a 2½” by 4½” rectangle of the high temperature, and a 2½” square of the low temperature.

Draw a line from corner to corner on the square and place the square on top of the rectangle, right sides together and matching corners. 

Sew along the line and trim ¼” from the line.  Press open and you have the first day!

Once all of my pieces are together, it will make a pattern that looks mostly like this (the diagram is only 3 blocks wide by 8 blocks tall- the finished quilt will be 12 columns of 31 blocks) , so keeping track of whether to cover the left or right corner is important.

To make sure I get it right, I printed out my diagram and wrote the date in each rectangle so I that I could easily keep track of which corner to use. This next diagram doesn’t show the whole quilt, but rather a 4-day example. With my messy handwriting, there is no way I’m showing you the actual diagram I wrote all over!

Making the alternate blocks is just as easy. A rectangle, a square, pencil line corner to corner, match up edges, sew, trim and press.

My first two blocks match up at the point in the center, so I pinned that point to get in exact, sewed, and pressed.

By looking at my diagram, I can see I want the hyacinth triangles on the right, with the rest of the navy on the left. I can then continue adding days to create a week and then a month. Each month will be it’s own column.

Only, there’s a problem! I mis-read the temperature chart. That photo above that is supposed to be the first week of my life? It’s not right. Oops! The site I used for my weather data also lists the average temperature for that day. I thought I was cutting squares for the low temperature for each day, I was actually reading the average temperature for the day! Whoops! At least I caught my mistake when I only had seven blocks and not a bunch. Here is the CORRECT first week!

I won’t post every step of this quilt on the blog, but I will pop in every once in a while, to show progress. You can follow along on Instagram or Facebook to see additional real-time progress.

Since a temperature quilt was one of my 2019 goals, you can definitely expect to see the finished project in my December end-of-the-year wrap up.

I worked ahead, so I can show you the first three weeks. The blocks aren’t all sewn together yet, the little bits of paper pinned to them tell the date, so that I can store them easily when I’m not working on the quilt, but easily get them back into the right place the next time I need them.

This is those same 21 days, just moved around a bit, to help you see how the small triangles will form squares – or more accurately, diamonds- as the rows get added together.

If you were to make a Temperature Quilt, would you do the current year or a past year?  If past, what year is significant to you?

UPDATE: Now that the year is over, you can click here to find a completed temperature quilt and additional tutorial information.