2024 Book Blanket

You may have seen Temperature Blankets all over your socials since the start of the year; blankets where you crochet a row or square to correspond with the daily temperature throughout the

year. I have attempted temperature blankets for the last couple of years and in all honesty I've always lost interest by the end of January. I guess I'm just not all that motivated by the weather, especially when I live in Scotland and it's just cold!

Towards the end of last year, I started to really get back into reading and logging my books on Goodreads (let's be friends!) Then I saw people on Instagram and TikTok making Book Blankets - now this is an idea I can get behind!

My Book Blanket

For my Book Blanket, I am going to be creating a granny square for each book that I read during the year.

At the end of each month I will make up my squares and then share them, plus a monthly wrap up of the books that I've read, here for you to see.

The Yarn:

I was very kindly been gifted some beautiful Yarnsmiths Create DK from Wool Warehouse that I will be using for my blanket. It's a super soft 100% acrylic yarn that is available in 120 different shades! This makes it ideal for a blanket like this because you can make up the perfect colour palette to suit your style.

I have gone for a mix of pinks and greens, which is a little out of my comfort zone but beautiful nonetheless, with a neutral shade for joining.

The Design:

I thought about this and looked at others' book blankets and temperature blankets for inspiration. Whilst I do love those that are done row by row I don't feel that it would work for me as I'm not sure I'd read enough books to create a decent size blanket over the year.

I have chosen to go with a granny square per book as I feel like these will provide a bit more bulk for the blanket overall even if I don't manage to read masses of books. My Goodreads Challenge goal is a conservative 33 books which I'm fairly certain I can achieve.

Each colour will represent a star rating for every book that I read from 0/DNF (Did Not Finish) up to 5 Stars. I am pretty generous with ratings for books that I enjoy so I've split my ratings up slightly adding in half stars for 3-5.

I tend to read two books at a time, one physical book and one on my Kindle (this is perfect for when I'm getting my youngest to sleep or doing a night feed) and I often listen to audiobooks too as I can have these on whilst I'm working. I really want to represent this in my blanket too so I will be making a different style square to denote the format of each book; traditional granny square = physical book, cluster granny square = Kindle book and heart square = audiobook.

Now I am a bit of a perfectionist and don't tend to do too well with projects with random colour ordering so I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about the mix of squares and colours as the project grows so this overall design may well change - only time will tell!

If you're making a book blanket too or think you'd like to start one then use the hashtags #BookBlanket2024 #BramblesandHartReads so that I can follow along with your progress!