Temperature Blankets, A Record of Naps Past?

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

One of the expressions I’ve been sharing when you and I do live presentations before audiences is temperature blanket, also known as a weather blanket.

And I can’t believe the response I’ve been getting.

People love these terms.

Yeah, I love them too.

I didn’t know them before you started talking about them in these presentations.

What I learned from you is that this is like a knitted blanket or it could be a scarf where the colors of each row represent the weather on that particular day in that particular place.

So it’s like a diary and yarn, you know, different blues for cool and different reds for warmth and so on.

Yeah. So you end up with this long garment, maybe a scarf or a blanket with these striations.

It kind of blends from one color into another and shows the weather across a stretch of time.

And they’re just the gorgeous, gorgeous documents.

And I love talking about them because they’re such a lovely way to store information.

For me, they go hand in hand with quipu, the knotted cord record keeping of the Inca, or the Marshallese stick charts, those navigation tools used to map the ocean.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just like that.

Yeah. But I’ve discovered it goes much deeper, Martha.

It does?

Yeah. There are a lot of people who make weather and temperature blankets and scarves for themselves, and they’re beautiful, lovely stuff.

But since 2017, there has been something called the Tempestry Project, T-E-M-P-E-S-T-R-Y.

The people involved are not only crafting the weather into tapestries, but they’re doing it for historical periods.

They’ve standardized it.

Makers are even extending the concept backward through time.

They’re doing what amounts to weather blankets for things like their grandparents’ lifetimes.

Oh, my gosh.

That is beautiful.

And I love the word tempestry.

That’s just incredible.

I just love the idea that maybe at some point in the future, you know, a thousand years from now, this archive of these tempestries will be discovered.

And, you know, it’ll be people like, oh, yeah, now we know the weather in 1820.

And this thing’s keeping me warm, too.

It’s amazing.

Well, I went online after you talked about this, and I looked up weather blanket, and there are some beautiful, beautiful examples online.

Where can we find out more?

Every good knitting site has information on temperature and weather blankets and scarves, but the tempestryproject.com is where to go for their particular focus.

Okay, tempestryproject.com.

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