Initial Post: March 8th, 2019

I am a nerd of many flavors, and a couple of those flavors make this project a particularly personal one for me.

First, I’m a data science nerd. I’m all about analytics of all sorts-- I have a massive multi-tab spreadsheet for keeping track of my finances, another for keeping track of my wardrobe, and many others short-term-use spreadsheets that I’ve used for planning various departmental activities.

Second, I’m a weather nerd. It’s kind of inevitable given my major. But being steeped in the science on a daily basis made me want to include as much data for each day into this blanket, since it highlights some connections between the various metrics that we use to monitor weather conditions. Therefore, I’ve collected four variables that will be charted in this project: daily maximum temperature, daily minimum temperature, daily maximum windspeed, and daily total precipitation.

All of my data is freely available station data, which I grabbed from the University of California Integrated Pest Management Program website, link here: http://ipm.ucanr.edu/WEATHER/index.html I mainly used data from the Lambert Road station, but filled in some missing days with both data from a Davis station and Weather Underground (https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/ca/sacramen...).

To make the color scale, I generated a sequence of hex color values using the R colorRampPalette function, and then matched those colors as closely as I could to the selection for Knitpicks Brava worsted. I based the breaks for my wind data on the Beufort scale, and kind of subjectively chose my precipitation breaks.

Then, it was time to make my pattern. I created a Google spreadsheet where I copied/pasted the station data, then used a whole bunch of nested if statements to fill in the corresponding values for the row colors and row stitches. If you’d like to get a copy of the spreadsheet, you can find it here: https://gofile.io/?c=MqkPkJ

Currently, I’m waiting for my yarn order to arrive. I haven’t quite settled on the width of the blanket, and if I want to do alternating colors per 1 row versus 2 rows with separate colors for the min/max temperatures. I’ve got mockups of both possibilities in the second and third tabs of the spreadsheet and I’ll play around with it once the yarn arrives.