My (unfinished) Budgie temperature quilt sure has gotten a lot of attention! I have not made a set of directions per-se of how to do a temperature quilt. However, my pattern Budgie Block Party includes four bird patterns, in both left and right orientations, including the one budgie that has individual wing sections.
This pattern talks about my process, of using the split feather bird as a temperature quilt, and provides a layout of 52 birds, and how I am creating my personal temperature quilt. It is not a completey perfect system… seven, two part wings x 52 weeks a year is actually 364 days. This means I am willing to ignore one day of the year. LOL.
In my 2000 temperature quilt however, during the setting phase of my quilt, I was willing to throw away 6 blocks in order to make my design work in rows…so I view this as a net win.
I did not sell the pattern to be a temperature quilt…so I don’t have any guilt over this artistic license.
As you can see in the pieced wing, the top half of the wing is the high of the day, the lower half of the wing is the low of the day. The other areas of the bird also relate to the temperature. The head, lower breast and back of the bird is the average high for the week. The cheek, upper breast and the tail is the average low for the week. I opted to use a larger range of temperatures for the averages and use solids. The wings used a smaller range, but every two steps use the stripe or plaid of the same color…in a way…reading as one color. I think this keeps the birds from looking too chaotic.
Examine my color chart. I used Allison Glass Stripes and Solids as my “wing” colors. The stripes do a great job also as reading as feather bits. I then used a yarn dye solid for the averages. Some of these were matching Allison Glass, others were Kaffe solids.
The trick with temperature quilts…is you can’t use other peoples charts. I live in Pennsylvania. We have a temperate climate with a fairly moderate swing. And while I like to huddle and whine in the winter about how cold it is, and complain bitterly in the summer about the heat, scientifically, my AVERAGE temperature in a week actually isn’t that cold or hot. So, as you can see from my scribbles, I had to make some adjustments so I could actually use all my planned colors. Sure, PA gets a day here and there of a high of 98 or even rarely 100…it does NOT bear out over a week. So for me to use my deepest red/pink I needed to lower the temperature I was “allowed” to use my swatch for so I had some hope of at least 2 or 3 birds getting to be the darkest color. The same is true for cold. I get a day or two of single digits, but rarely an average week of sustained super cold.
If you lived in Hawaii, for example, you will need a chart with a bunch of colors…but your colors might ONLY represent the temperature shift from 69-85 degrees. This is the big fallacy of temperature quilts. If you live in Austin, Texas or in Whitefish, Montana…your temperatures will range from blistering to freezing. It is really quite personal.
I definitely needed to fiddle around with my temperature average high and low scale so I could be sure to get a few purple/light blue birds and a few hot red and orange ones. But as a temperate climate….much of the average falls in the Green/Yellow/Orange group for me.
There are several websites you can use to figure out your daily temperatures. I have made several temperature quilts now, and I 100% prefer to make them from the past. I do NOT have the patience to look up the daily temperature.
When I started my birds, I waited until the end of the month, then made them all at once and “caught up”.
Unfortunately life derailed me mid year…and I still haven’t finished 2022…even though 2023 is coming to a close.
My favorite web site for looking up lovely ranges of temperatures is Weather Channel Underground. It has unlimited data from what I can see. Accuweather.com also has a way to look at past weather…but only 2 years back. Here is the link for Weather Channel Underground:
The above quilt is my first temperature quilt in 2020, but used the same color plan, with only using the stripes and plaids section. This was a pretty classic approach of one drunkard path block per day. The round quarter circle was the high and the L shaped leg the low. Once the whole year was finished, I played around with the orientation of the blocks flowing the year corner to corner. Being the “pandemic” year…I arranged the setting of these to also pair with the chaos in my professional life at the time as I had to re-think my life goals.
My 2021 temperature quilt will never be a pattern, much to the annoyance of many. It was inspired by the pattern Flock Together, by Stacey Day. Now, Stacey’s quilt has 10 feathers and they are made with several enormous pieces of striped fabric as a free pattern for Free Spirit in order to feature Tula Pink’s tent stripe fabrics and big dots. Nevertheless, I feel the look is too similar, and I will not be poaching on Stacey’s concept, even though mine has 12 feathers, with 28-31 pieces of “temperature” on two sides of the spine.
In this temperature quilt, I used a similar temperature scale, but only solids. However unlike my others, I did the temperature of where on the planet my body was…which included Hawaii at Christmas and a trip to Moab, Utah in the middle of summer. I resorted to little dots of embroidery to indicate HOW very outside my norms that was! Each dot is a degree ABOVE 100…which is something we just don’t deal with in Pennsylvania. My Hawaiian vacation is a warm temperate splotch at the end of a very blue and purple, otherwise cold Pennsylvania December.
The embroidery on the spine are little sections of my travel, with braille dots on the spine. This image says “UT” for Utah.
I have yet to quilt this quilt…sigh…but UFO’s are like that. With the wisdom of hindsight, I don’t think I will do a travel temperature quilt again. I find it a bit confusing to look at.
here is the link to Stacey Day’s free pattern with Free Spirit, Flock Together
Hopefully you enjoy my thoughts on making temperature quilts!
~Bethanne
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