Note: I’m getting a lot of questions about how this cat is made. The pattern I used is the large version that is published in the book “Hello My Name is Amineko: The Story of a Crafty Crochet Cat by Nekoyama”. By comparing this version with the regular pattern as linked above, I managed to figure out how to have the cat have 365 colored rows, starting at the bottom of the legs, and ending at the tip of the ears. This meant enlarging the large version by about 2.4 times. Because the large pattern is not available for free, I don’t feel at liberty to share the pattern, nor do I have it readily available at this time. Also note this idea of a temperature project originated with a year in temperatures scarf pattern as linked below, and there’s been many interpretations of this idea, including blankets. I encourage you to give your own interpretation to the idea. If you want to make a temperature amineko you are of course free to do so but be warned, it is a labor of love, and I wouldn’t do it again myself.

Finished! Jan 20: I finished the second ear this weekend and assembled the head tonight. I’m very happy with how he turned out. I won’t be doing this again, but it’s been great!

Update Dec 17: everything is done except for the mouth and ears. I’ve put everything else together today. It looks pretty cool! I’ll do the mouth over the holidays. The ears need to wait till January as I can only do those top to bottom.

Update Sep 16: The body and arms are done, and I’ve started on working the head. Just a week or two behind. I’ll have to start stuffing the body when the head gets reduced, that’ll be around early november. From then on it’ll be trickier to work on but I’m sure I’ll get it done.

Update July 28: still catching up, now have the body and one arm up to date, just the other arm to go and I’ll be all caught up! I’m loving the way it looks!

Update July 14: I’ve gotten behind on this and am now in the progress of catching up, not easy, the body is big and a row takes a while, and I’m even more behind on the arms, one white part is done but the other isn’t, and there’s well over 50 rows to do on each. I’ve got the body done to the end of June, I really want to get caught up, the colors are great.

Update April 6: The legs and tail are done, they run up to April 1. It’s an unusual year temperature wise. A lot more blue than you would normally see. I thankfully found a replacement for the 0-3 degree color, because that one turned out to be discontinued. I could well have gotten in trouble at the end of the year! Also bought an extra skein of the 3-6 degree color. On to the body, hoping to see lots of oranges and reds.

I loved the idea of the year in temperatures scarf. However, the only yarn I have in an abundance of colors is “ami” cotton. So I got this idea. Could I figure out a pattern for an Amineko that is 365 rows tall?

I took the original and bigger size pattern from the book and did a lot of calculating. By making this Amineko 2.4 times bigger than the big pattern I managed to get 365 rows from the ears down to the colored part of the legs. I’ll be starting with the legs (first rows in off white) and working my way up.

Because I wanted to use stash as much as possible I decided to go for a total of 26 colors. I think some of the colours I am the middle of the range will require more than one skein.

I’ve divided the temperature scale from below -3c up to above 30c such that the middle (6-25) has 1 color per degree, and the extremes have 1 color per 3 degrees. The colors are shown with the temperature in 0.1 degrees, because that’s how the data is presented by the weather station.

The pic shows the row colors as they would have been for 2012.

Update Feb 13: Wow. This neko will be humongous! I knew it would be big but somehow it’s hard to picture it until you see it really. Finished the offwhite part of the first leg last night and added several of the colored rows. This foot is bigger than the body of the big pattern!

I did some measuring. The small neko sits at just under 6 inches (15 cm) tall, the big pattern at about 11.5 (29cm), this one will sit at 27.5 (70 cm)! I had to measure other things around the house to get an impression of how high that is. Wow.

Laying it down the small neko is 8.5” (21.5cm) from head to toe. The big pattern is 17” (43cm). This one would be 41” (103cm). Good gracious, what have I started….