crocheted

mood blanket

In 2024, I noncommittally committed to crocheting (on average) 1 row per day, using yarn colors that represented emotions I experienced that day.

Why?

  • 65% - I wanted to see what it felt like to build something slowly with love, rather than quickly with passion

  • 15% - I can’t seem to resist opportunities to test myself (positive)

  • 15% - I can’t seem to resist opportunities to test myself (negative)

  • 5% - I love data!

Mood Analysis (i.e., the Breakdown Breakdown <3)

  • Per emotion count

  • Graphing incidence of each emotion over time?

Several Birds, One Stone

  • The mood blanket was a pre-coded, repetitive, low effort and low time-commitment project; I just needed to use the color I felt, for roughly 250 stitches (~5-8 minutes of crocheting for me), on average once a day (key operating word: average). Once, I went two weeks without crocheting but kept track of my moods so I could blast through a mega catch up session when I had time.

  • It helped me practice emotion regulation and gratitude, which is something I’ve historically struggled with, as a rather unfortunately short-sighted and Highly Emotional Overthinker.

Blanket Specs

  • Size 5mm crochet hook

  • Acrylic yarn, gauge 4

  • Foundation chain: ~250 st, give or take a few

  • Used moss/linen crochet stitch (sc1, ch1)

Tracking in Notion

This one goes out to a free productivity app called Notion.

By a stroke of good luck, I learned about Notion through my corporate job in product management, where I was using it to track ongoing action items and manage information in databases (all the corporate jargon stuff). So, I decided to try using it for my own personal project –– tracking and analyzing a year’s worth of emotions.

The database I set up was pretty simple. It had 4 columns:

  1. Date

  2. Number day of the year (e.g., X/365)

  3. Color/Emotion

  4. Status (Not yet started, In Progress, Complete)

Once this table was set up, all I had to do every day was create a new row/data point and mark which emotions I felt. Once I finished crocheting the row on the blanket, I would mark the status as “complete.”

Having this easily updatable system gave me flexibility to collect mood data without actually having to physically crochet them that same day, so if I was ever out of town traveling for a little while, I could come back and pick up where I left off.

The other awesome thing about using Notion was that I could filter by each mood I’d created as a separate “tag” within certain date ranges, so I could analyze the incidence rate of each emotion and see if maybe there were any patterns over time.