Creative articles about quilting

Temperature Quilt-Along: Temperature intervals, fabrics, worksheets

Happy New Year to you all – may 2025 bring you health, cheerfulness, peace and vibrant creativity! We are starting the New Year with a big plan and are sewing the BERNINA Temperature Quilt together. For some of you it will be your first quilt ever. I am thrilled to be able to take so many of you on this journey with me and even motivate quilting newbies to participate. Are you all ready? Here we go at last! Today we are going to look at the worksheets used for the Quilt-Along and assign temperature intervals to our fabrics.

What is the Temperature Quilt-Along?

Maybe you’ve landed right here and don’t know what the Temperature Quilt-Along is all about? No problem, we’re just getting started. You are more than welcome to join us. No registration is necessary.

Our project in a nutshell: We will sew a temperature quilt together. This will represent the daily temperatures measured by you over the course of the year and tell your personal weather story, day by day, block by block. The quilt consists of 365 blocks and will be a reflection of your year.

Would you like to take part? Wonderful! Then read the announcement article with all the information first.

On the following page you will find an overview of all the articles that have been published so far: BERNINA Temperature Quilt-Along – all previous articles.

Classify temperature intervals and assign substances

A temperature quilt represents the highs and lows for a location over the course of a year. The first step is to transfer our fabrics to a temperature intervals, with each color representing a specific temperature range. This is what we are doing today. We also need to record the minimum and maximum temperatures for each day. To make the bookkeeping easier for you, I have created a temperature quilt planner for you:

Temperature Skala Year Overview

Download the PDF and print out the three pages in A4 format.

The PDF contains three pages. Today we are only working with the first page and assigning our fabrics to the temperature scale.

On pages two and three of the PDF you will find an annual calendar. We will enter the minimum and maximum daily temperatures in this calendar. You can find out more about this in an article that will be published on January 8. Don’t worry, you won’t miss anything if you don’t measure temperatures today!

Prepare fabrics for organization

Lay out your fabrics in the correct order. You can find the order in the second post on the Temperature Quilt-Along.

Andrea Kollath has provided all the fabrics with labels, where you will find the color name of the fabric. To prevent the labels from coming loose, secure them with a pin.

Unfold the fabric and cut off a strip approx. 1.5 cm x 6 cm at the selvedge, as shown in the photo. Then fold the fabric back together and put it back in the correct order.

Set temperature intervals

For the BERNINA Temperature Quilt-Along I have set a temperature intervals between -23°C and +36°C. I live in Germany, so I note the temperatures in Celsius. If you prefer Fahrenheit, then you may want to create your own temperature chart. Feel free to share it with us in the comments! We are a large community with sewers from many regions and countries. The wide temperature range should work well in most places in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and also cover any extremes up and down. Of course, it can happen that one or the other fabric is not needed in one place or another. That is part and parcel of a temperature quilt. We can’t predict the weather, and that’s a good thing.

We work with 20 fabric colors and therefore 20 temperature intervals. The intervals cover 3-degree increments.

If you live in a place where extremely hot or extremely cold temperatures are common, or if you expect the temperature range to be significantly lower because you live in northern Sweden or southern Brazil, for example, you can choose other ranges or subdivisions. Then determine the maximum and minimum temperature of the last few years, add a small safety margin and work on this basis. You can find historical weather data on the Internet. Please note that in the instructions on the BERNINA blog I cannot go into individual classifications, but work with the above-mentioned classifications.

Now enter the color name and the corresponding temperatures in the form as shown below. It helped me to enter all 3 numbers when sewing the pattern quilt.

  • Charcoal -23°C/-22°C/-21°C
  • Dark Violett -20°C/-19°C/-18°C
  • Midnight -17°C/-16°C/-15°C
  • Windsor -14°C/-13°C/-12°C
  • Celestial -11°C/-10°C/-9°C
  • Glacier -8°C/-7°C/-6°C
  • Robin Egg -5°C/-4°C/-3°C
  • Iron -2°C/-1°C/0°C
  • Snow +1°C/+2°C/+3°C
  • Quick Silver +4°C/+5°C/+6°C
  • Champagne +7°C/+8°C/+9°C
  • Lime +10°C/+11°C/+12°C
  • Melon +13°C/+14°C/+15°C
  • Peach +16°C/+17°C/+18°C
  • Coral +19°C/+20°C/+21°C
  • Pomegranate +22°C/+23°C/+24°C
  • Carrot +25°C/+26°C/+27°C
  • Tomato +28°C/+29°C/+30°C
  • Sangria +31°C/+32°C/+33C
  • Crimson +34°C/+35°C/+36°C

German Template

Arrange the cut-out fabric strips on top of each other.

Stick a narrow strip of double-sided adhesive tape onto the form and remove the cover strip. Alternatively, you can work with a glue stick.

Stick the fabric samples next to the name one after the other.

This is what your almost finished worksheet looks like. Did you do everything right?

To ensure that the fabric samples last the whole year, you also sew them onto the worksheet. Tip: Make a second sheet and put it in a drawer in case the first one disintegrates, disappears or whatever. Better safe than sorry.

Cut back the excess fabric ends at the edge of the worksheet. Well done and finished. Now you’re almost ready to start, aren’t you?

More worksheets for the Temperature Quilt-Along

Now we download further PDFs, print them out and have them ready.

If you have chosen the Snowball variant, print only this one, print setting 90%.

The template for the Snowball

Under the following link you will find the temperature sheet for the snowball quilt:

Snowball – TempSheet

The template for the Flying Geese

If you are sewing the flying geese version, you will need the two templates below:

Here is the temperature sheet for the flying geese quilt, print setting 90%:

FlyingGeese – TempSheet

FPP pattern for the Flying Geese

Last but not least, below you will find a PDF with the pattern for the Flying Geese, which we will sew using the foundation paper piecing method. You will get more information on this when I explain the sewing techniques in a separate article.

For today, all you have to do is download the PDF, print it out (print setting 100%) and have it ready. Very important: Make sure that you print without resizing, i.e. with scaling=100%, and check this using the control square with an edge length of 1 inch.

Here is the download link:

Our day’s work is now complete. The worksheets are prepared and we are ready for the next step.

Measure and enter daily temperatures

As already mentioned, the next article will follow on January 8. Then we’ll look at how we get our temperature values and enter them.

We can find the temperatures on the internet; I’ll show you where. You won’t miss anything if you don’t take a measurement today and in the following days.

If you want to use your own sources to determine the daily temperatures, you are of course free to do so and to start recording the daily minimum and maximum values now.

Winners of the launch raffle

Many thanks to all the participants in the starting raffle and congratulations to the winners who were drawn by lot. The yarn sets from Mettler and material kits from korkundkulör go to the following winners:

And here’s instructions and patterns for sewing purses with the cactus leather material kit: Sew small purses from cactus leather

We’ll continue here on January 8. See you then!

Best regards
Jutta

Related content you may be interested in

Comments of this post

14 Responses

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Required fields are marked *

Dear BERNINA Blog readers,

if you want to publish pictures via the comment function, please log in to the blog first. Click here to sign in.

You haven't registered for the BERNINA blog yet? Click here to create your free account.

Thank you very much

Your BERNINA Blog Team