Live a Colorful Life Quilt Diary: 137. Tale of Two Cities

Tale of Two Cities began when I was in a block exchange group with Rachel Riley. Temperature quilts are all the rage now, but I'd really like to give Rachel the credit for being the pioneer when it comes to temperature quilts.

I had a stack of Grunge fabric and decided to make a few alterations from Rachel's quilt, as she had only recorded the highs during the hot months and then switched to the lows during the cold months.

I would record the high and low of each day. I soon began to realize that a quilt based on Fresno, California, would be, um....repetitious, to say the least. I needed to a city that would have more contrast in temperatures throughout the year, some actual "weather." Mark's brother lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. I knew I would be able to get a wider range of temperatures and it would also be interesting to compare and contrast.

It took awhile to assign the temperature ranges. Originally I thought I would go from warm colors, to cool colors, with white being the lowest temperature.

I finally settled on white being "freezing" (31 to 35 degrees), with the cool colors getting darker as the temperatures dropped. The bottom picture shows the final color range with the top left square being 111+ degrees and the top right square being anything below -26. Yikes!

I kept a daily journal, which was actually really fun. I started cutting and sewing. Because I was recording both high and low temperature for each day of the month, I realized the months themselves needed to be separated, so I used a narrow strip of black between each month, and a grey rectangle for the months that had less than 31 days.

Once in awhile I would see that we broke a record, so I inserted a little black scrap--the one below is for breaking a record high held since 1902.

And then for three days in a row in July, we broke a record for having the highest lows--I usually have to think about that one for a couple seconds. Yep, those three nights just never cooled down. When I told someone I never used the fabric signifying 111+ degrees, they couldn't believe it never got above 110 because it sure felt like it. But of course I couldn't factor in the heat index for Fresno or the wind chill for St. Paul.

Sometimes I had a little helper who loved to move the squares around for me.

But at the end of the year it was fun to sew both tops together. Darby Myers used one of my favorite quilt designs.

Without further ado, here is what Fresno temperatures looked like in 2014.

And St. Paul for the same time period.

I added these labels to the quilt.

It's fascinating, interesting and fun to see the differences in the two sides. The vertical strip along the left on each side is the temperature gauge.

Mark and I took the quilt to a local middle school and photographed it beneath the current temperature. Wouldn't you know? At 6:30 p.m., in May, in Fresno, it was still 91 degrees.

For QuiltCon 2018, Kitty Wilkin was doing a lecture on making quilts that document things going on in your life, and she included Tale of Two Cities in her lecture. What an honor!