WIPGO 2023 – Week 29 – Temperature Tree

In the last several years, a popular stitch-a-long trend has been to do a “temperature thing.” I’ve seen them in cross stitching, knitting, and crocheting – and I’m sure they’re done across other craft and art forms as well. I decided to join the bandwagon in 2021 with a pretty tree from Stitchin’ Mommy on Etsy:

Temperature Tree by Stitchin’ Mommy. (picture is from my black and white working copy, sorry!)

Each limb of the tree is a month, starting on the bottom left. Each leaf represents a day. The stitcher determines whether they’ll be doing the high temperature, an average, a low, etc. There are suggested colors and temperature bands for each color in the pattern. Since it’s so customizable, I created my own bands based off their suggestions, but just used floss colors that I happened to have sitting around in my stash.

The tree trunk and branches took me much longer than I expected to finish, but I’m now working on the leaves. It’s going to be so pretty when it’s done! I added the heart “carving” in the tree for my initials and the year.

Temperature Tree as of July 30, 2023. Stitched 2 over 2 on 32 ct Dreamin’ Lugana from Silkweaver (old stock) with DMC.

As of now I have all of January and about half of February 2021 noted. I am doing high temperatures for each day, according to Weather Underground’s closest station to my location. I like using this site because historical temperatures are super easy to find, and I can sort the view by a week at a time – easy to stitch! 🙂

Since Providence’s temperatures vary widely and I wanted to have a very colorful tree, here’s my color code, if you’re in need of customizing your own color-coded temperature pattern. As I’m an American, I’m working in Fahrenheit, so the Celsius conversions may look a little weird in this chart. Some colors were skeins that had missing labels (perfect for this type of project!):

DMC ColorTemperature (F)Temperature (C)
839TreeTree
81596+36 and above
372192-9533 to 35
Mystery burnt orange (920?)88-9131 to 32
92284-8729 to 30
382480-8327 to 28
385576-7925 to 26
72872-7522 to 24
78368-7120 to 21
83264-6718 to 19
73460-6316 to 17
46956-5913 to 15
98852-5511 to 12
36848-519 to 10
381544-477 to 8
89040-434 to 6
380936-392 to 3
376832-350 to 1
34028-31-2 to -1
Mystery purple24-27-4 to -3
79223 and below-5 and below

I am working on this project for the Stitch-a-Long SAL (SAL SAL) in August for both WIPocalypse and the Stitch All The Things versions, plus Semi Sane’s Wheel of WIPs, so I’m really hoping this will be an August finish!