Crocheters Weave Together Past And Present Through Temperature Blankets

When Cierra Pike crochets, she feels peaceful. It’s rather ironic, because she crochets on the couch at night as her husband and sons race around the house, shouting and playing.

“I crochet to help me relax and everything during the evening because I’m a working mom,” Pike said. “I love to be able to sit with them, enjoy their sounds, while I also regress into my own little world.”

A resident of Rural Retreat, Virginia, Pike is creating — or more accurately, commemorating — a world within her crocheting by making a temperature blanket. Each row represents a day in the year she has chosen to capture in yarn. Different colors represent a temperature range.

Pike explains the concept as a way to track important moments in life. 

“That’s how that went, how the weather was that day. I never would have thought about that. But that was really special,” she said. “You can kind of look back and they’re all different colors. They’re all the same colors in each row. But it all tells a story.”

Some crafters stick to colored stripes rendered in a single crochet, the simplest of stitches. Others choose more complicated patterns like granny squares or rippled rows. What the blanket records can be as casual or deeply layered as its creator chooses.

Pike has chosen to dive deep with her current blanket, which uses a color scheme inspired by Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” She uses a raised puff stitch that looks like a little pillow to commemorate other special events.

“Date nights, games that my boys have played, things that I know I’ll be able to look back on and just be like, ‘Oh, that was a really special day,’” Pike said.

She does regret missing one day, which she had already crocheted past before realizing she wanted to commemorate it. 

“The one that I really wish I would have put on there, we saw an otter in a local pond. We didn’t even know otters lived here, and it was the cutest thing ever,” she said. “So he’s probably getting a charm.”

Charms or buttons can mark special events. During the COVID years, people wove black ribbons along a row to commemorate a loss. Many still do this, plus use white, blue, or pink to note family additions.

Part Of An Ancient Tradition

Textile storytelling is common to most cultures, but Pike got inspired after watching a documentary about Aztecs and Incas weaving and knotting symbols into clothing and calendars. 

Dr. Veronica Rodriguez is a Spanish professor at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. Her studies include how ancient Mesoamerican cultures used symbols in clothing. She sees temperature blankets as just another example of a long-standing, cross-cultural tradition of people using textiles to tell stories.

“Textiles were used to record history. The colors meant something, the design meant something,” Rodriguez said. “I think it’s great that people are using those fabrics to tell a story, because it’s handmade and it’s art and they learn from their grandma and mom. It’s an ancestral sort of thing. And I think that’s something that we don’t appreciate.”

The oldest preserved example of a story on cloth is arguably Europe’s Bayeux Tapestry, completed in 1077 to commemorate the Battle of Hastings. In Appalachia, telling stories using quilts appeared with the first settlers, while Indigenous weaving and embroidery depicting community events were here long before they arrived. 

Lost In The Zone

Chris McKnight is a retired pharmacist from Wise, Virginia. McKnight sees making temperature blankets as a combination of family documentation and affection. She has made temperature blankets for her husband and brother, chronicling significant years in their lives.

“It increases the thoughtfulness of the gift when you can say I made this for you and I chose this year because it meant something in your life,” McKnight says. “So it’s not just a blanket to put over you but it has a little bit of meaning behind it and I hope that you realize I was thinking of you with every row I put in the blanket.”

Her husband’s afghan documents the year they met. McKnight used his favorite sports team’s colors, which necessitated hunting down six shades of purple and three of gold. But it isn’t just the recipient McKnight thinks of as she crochets. She also thinks of the person who taught her more than 55 years ago, her grandmother.

“I like keeping it alive. It keeps me close to her, even though she’s gone,” McKnight said.

And sometimes, McKnight can’t identify what she was thinking about as she moved her hook through the yarn in a repetitive, fluid motion. Even when concentrating on a complex pattern, she finds herself lost not in the memories she was capturing, but in a zone of Zen.

“In that zone where I’m thinking about something else, but my hands are working, and I’ll get to the next row and think, ‘What was I thinking about five minutes ago?’,” McKnight said with a laugh. “Because I can’t get my hook in this stitch!” 

Karen Long, an armed forces widow living in Hillsville, Virginia, also likes zoning out while crocheting. Long learned from an important elder figure in her life as well.

“My husband’s grandmother came to visit one weekend, I told her, I said, ‘Grandma, I want to learn how to crochet,’” Long recalled. “And I went and got some yarn and a crochet hook and she sat down with me. And by the time she left, I had made a pair of slippers and a triangular type poncho thing for my daughter.”

Long followed those up over the next thirty years by making an afghan for each of her 12 grandchildren. This includes a posthumous one for a granddaughter murdered by her partner. That blanket was donated to a domestic violence fundraiser. Long is glad her granddaughter’s blanket served such a good cause.

Long is currently making two temperature blankets for herself. One records high temperatures for the year, the other lows. They give her space to think about whatever she wants, like the highs and lows of her life. Or not to think at all.

“I enjoy keeping up with it because it gives me a sense of hey, I’m sticking with this,” Long said. “I can sit and do it and watch television at the same time. Or just kind of space out while I’m doing it.”

Long, McKnight, and Pike share that sense of “groundedness”-meets-zoned-outness when making these afghans. And, as Pike points out, they are also knitting the past and the future together through crocheting.

“Memories are what make the world go around. They keep us grounded. They make us strive for more, and if you can have a visual representation of that in front of you, every day, it’s something that’s going to go for generations,” Pike said.

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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.