The Sleep Blanket, Mark 2

A visualization of my daughter's sleep pattern from birth to her first birthday. Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep #knitting #crochet #dataviz

The blanket is 46.5" wide and 52" tall. To accommodate the transition to the crochet border, I added a few rows and columns of knitting around the grid of the visualization for a total of about 3,000 crochet stitches and 185,000 knit stitches

Averaging at just over 5 rows per day, I finished the knit portion in 73 days. It took a few days to clean up some untidy edges and add the crochet border, both of which were incredibly tedious and fiddly. From start to finish, it took 83 days to complete the blanket

The sleep data was collected using the @BabyConnect app. I exported sleep events as CSVs and converted them to JSON to make it easier to transform and manipulate. This let me generate visualizations at any scale and access individual sleep events with JavaScript and Python

This time around, I decided to knit the entire blanket at once instead of knitting smaller panels to stitch together. This saved me about a week of tidying edges and while the seams are very inconspicuous, I definitely prefer the look of a single continuous piece of knitting

Making it in one piece did present some challenges. To start, I had to cast on 492 stitches and at 4' wide, it was pretty manageable at first but it got big pretty fast. It was a little bulky but luckily I was mostly carrying it between my desk and the couch

My old pattern tracker was designed for smaller pieces so I had to rebuild it from the ground up. It was an interesting challenge trying to display all the blocks of colors in a way that was easy to read and not always lose my place
https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/m2/

I designed it long before I had any stitches on needles so I had to scramble to make some changes a few days into knitting. It runs significantly better than the old tracker and can scale to pretty much any size

I also added a progress tracker to log my pace and projected completion date. This was both motivating and very daunting, especially at the start, but it saved me from doing this math in my head at the end of every row

To help transfer the pattern onto the needles, I placed markers every 10 stitches using different colors to indicate how far along it was on the row. This let me quickly and accurately place markers to indicate where the yarn color changed

This worked great for the simpler rows towards the bottom but as the pattern got more complex, there were just more and more markers I had to place. There were parts of the blanket where I had well over 50 markers on the needles

And still, I managed to make mistakes

So. Many. Mistakes. Some were easily fixed in the next pass. Others required more attentive surgery to fix. I had to tink a few rows and only once did I resort to frogging about 10 rows because I'd accidentally duplicated a row

To my credit, almost all the mistakes I made were in accurately transferring the pattern. The number of technical knitting mistakes I made like dropped or inverted stitches was in the single digits. It was nice to see some evidence that I was just getting better at knitting

I made a few changes to my technique so knitting started feeling more effortless and efficient. When I started, it took almost an hour to finish a row. By the end, I could do one in 20 minutes. I guess it's hard to avoid improving at something you do for several hours a day

As I was barreling towards the end of the project, I was simultaneously anxious to finish it and sad that it would be over soon. I realized that this would probably be the last time I would make one of these blankets

Still, it was a relief to bind off the last stitch, and tuck away all the loose ends. I'd had it folded up in my lap for so long and was so used to looking at it up close that it honestly stunned me when I finally laid it out and saw it as a completed blanket

Looking at it side by side with my son's blanket, it's really striking to see how different the patterns are despite both having the same progression of chaos coalescing into distinct naptimes

The part that stands out the most is the incredibly consistent bedtime we were able to enforce because my son had his routine in place already. The consequence of this consistency was that my daughter would get up and be AWAKE every day around 4am

It was exhausting at the time but I think fondly of this period where I got dedicated time alone with my daughter every morning. We spent most of it watching @dontrythis making stuff on YouTube but it would always end with her falling asleep on me for her first nap of the day

When I finally gave the blanket to her, she seemed mesmerized by the pattern at first and was inspecting it carefully but soon she was rolling around on it and pretending to take a nap and then jumping from section to section yelling “Purple!" with each hop

At one point she paused and stood staring down at her feet. I could see her wiggling and pressing her toes into the blanket. I ran my hand across the fabric and pressed down on it too. It felt really nice.