What is a Tempestry?
A Tempestry is a scarf-sized temperature tapestry or wallhanging that represents the daily high temperatures for a given location and year, with January at the bottom and December at the top — like a bar graph. Each day is worked in the color assigned to its temperature range, creating a beautifully colorful visual representation of local climate.
All Tempestries use the same yarn (our domestically sourced Tempestry Yarn that’s custom milled and dyed in Pennsylvania, it’s a worsted weight Merino blend at 100g = 220yds) to represent the same temperature range. By using our universal color/temperature system that ranges from -30°F all the way up to 120°F, Tempestries from locations all around the world can be visually compared to each other.
Individually, Tempestries are a beautiful commemoration of an important year — a birth year, a wedding, a graduation, etc. Collectively, they begin to tell a tale of global climate over time in a tactile, beautiful, and immediately recognizable way.
What is a Needle Wrangler?
Simply put, Needle Wranglers wrangle your knitting needles. They are an ingenious replacement for those annoying rubber point protectors which are meant to keep your stitches on your needles but inevitably fall off and get lost. They are also a wonderful replacement for rubber bands, as they also keep your needles together so they don’t go flopping around and snag in your knitting.
What’s with the beads?
We offer two different beading options in our kits.
First and simplest are our Commemorative Beads. These are simply beads to mark a special day on an individual Tempestry — often a birthday or wedding day. Any beads can be used for this, but in our kits we include 25 clear glass triangular size 5/0 beads to be placed on alternating stitches across the row/day to be commemorated. (We recommend every other stitch so you don’t cover up the yarn color for that day.)
Second are Precipitation Beads. We needed a precipitation beading system that would cover dry regions all the way up to rainforests and even Hurricane Harvey-level weather events. After much trial and error we eventually settled on a system of 3 different colors for 3 different increments of precipitation, all size 5/0 triangular beads. Clear beads = .10″ of precipitation, aqua beads = 1.0″, and sapphire beads = 5.0″ of rain.
If you’re working on your own Tempestries outside of using our kits, please try to use a beading system as close to ours as possible in order to be a part of our larger global climate mosaic.
We get our beads from Fire Mountain Gems, a wonderful online bead resource.
What are the different Needle Wrangler sizes?
We make three different Needle Wrangler sizes, and all work on circulars and straights in plastic, wood, metal, and squares (and probably hexagonal, though we haven’t tried those yet!)
Mini Needle Wranglers are perfect for your lace knitting, or sock knitting on circular needles. They fit needles sizes US0-US3.
Standard Needle Wranglers are our most popular size, covering the midrange (US4-US11) in needle sizes.
Jumbo Needle Wranglers are designed for your extra chunky knits, fitting US13-US19 needles.