New Mexico is on the left, California is in the middle, and Washington is on the right.

In late 2021 I decided that I wanted to make three temperature quilts: one for my town in northern New Mexico, one for my stepdaughter who resides in a city in the Bay Area of California, and one for my stepson who lives in a city in the state of Washington. I decided to use the same Kona solids for each quilt to depict each temperature range to be able compare the different temperatures for each state. I used 2″x4″ finished flying geese in all three quilts, paper-piecing all the flying geese (daily when possible so not to get too far behind) using Lee@Freshly Pieced’ Perfect Flying Geese and keeping track of the date, state, and colors on the paper to keep me organized. I used Accuweather to track temperatures. I designated the large triangles (geese) for each day’s high temperature, and the small triangles (sky) represented the low temperatures. On January 1st, I pointed all the large triangles for all three states up, and then for subsequent days, the direction of the large triangles was determined whether the temperature increased (pointed up), stayed the same (still pointed up) or decreased (pointed down).

These are the Kona colors with associated temperature ranges: <0 Orchard Ice, 0-9 Violet, 10-14 Magenta, 15-19 Geranium, 20-24 Dark Violet, 25-29 Purple, 30-34 Noble Purple, 35-39 Surf, 40-44 Ocean, 45-49 Celestial, 50-54 Mediterranean, 55-59 Cyan, 60-64 Glacier, 65-69 Clover, 70-74 Kiwi, 75-79 Chartreuse, Citrus 80-84, Papaya 85-89, Torch 90-94, and Coral 95-99. There were no temperatures in 2022 for any of our cities in the 100s. I use Kona Charcoal to sew rectangles to the end of the columns for the months that don’t have 31 days. I only had one day the entire year where the high and low temps were in the same temperature range which was WA Jan 5th Surf 35-39.

Early in 2022, I decided that I wanted Rebecca of Rebecca Grace Quilting to do the quilting on all three temperature quilts, and I knew I wanted to use a Charcoal Minky backing, so in September I ordered seven yards of Shannon Minky Solid Cuddle in Charcoal and had it shipped to Rebecca who was nice enough to store it for me until she received my quilt tops about three weeks ago. I have to tell you that the back looks AMAZING. Here’s a pic that Rebecca took of my New Mexico temp quilt before she returned it to me:

The bobbin thread is grey and wonderfully highlights the quilting on the minky backing, but the thread that I am most excited about is the thread we chose for the front of all three quilts which was Glide Sprout:

At the top of this post I have photos of all three finished temperature quilts taken outside mid morning on 1/28/23 (click on the photos to enlarge them). The sun was shining brightly which tends to wash out the colors, but I definitely wanted to include some outside shots. I also took pics of all three quilts on my bed. Here is New Mexico:

Here is California:

And here is Washington:

Finally here is a close-up of some of the quilting on the Washington temperature quilt with the awesome Go With The Flow Quilting in Glide Sprout done by Rebecca (which shows up better on the Charcoal border above):

I had Spoonflower print up customized labels for all three quilts (for info about the process see this post here). Below is a pic of my New Mexico label sewn in:

I started binding the quilts on Jan 21st, the day after I got them back from Rebecca. I ended binding them all a little differently. For my New Mexico temp quilt, I machine stitched the binding on both sides and thought that some of my wobbly sewing showed up too much on the binding on the front of the quilt. For the Washington quilt, I sewed the binding to the back (because I thought I was going to machine stitch it down on the front like I did for NM but then changed my mind) and hand-stitched the binding to the front. For the California quilt, I machine sewed the binding on the front of the quilt and hand-stitched it to back which took a lot of time because hand-sewing with minky fabric is NOT fun! It’s difficult to get through the fluff to fabric underneath. If I use a minky backing in the future and want to hand-stitch the binding, I will definitely do it like I did for the Washington quilt–machine stitch on the back, hand-stitch on the front.

I wrote a lot of posts about these temperature quilts over the past year. If you want to read in more detail, please use the Search This Blog box and type in temperature, and more posts than you likely will want to read will be listed.

I am SO pleased with how these temperature quilts turned out, but I have to tell you all that making three temperature quilts at one time is CRAZY!!! But now that they’re finished, I’m glad I did!

Linking up to Stitching Cubby Hole: TGIFF.