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Galaxy Cross Stitch

A temperature tracking pattern by Climbing Goat Designs

Okay, I have to go back and check my XStitch magazines because I am sure I have seen Climbing Goat Designs before. But I stumbled across it again recently on FB and discovered they were doing a stars stitch-along in 2022 so I bought that – wonders of the night sky – more on that in another post 😉

Then someone mentioned the rainbow temperature galaxy pattern, so I had to go give that a look and well, I looked. And I was hooked. Conveniently enough I have some down time now to get them both ready.

Okay first of all – why do I love the temperature tracking pattern so much? Probably because it’s complicated, and fiddly, and I had an excuse to pull out the spreadsheets! (well, “pull out” in this case means open another tab on the laptop; but I am a sucker for spreadsheets).

This is the example from the website. Yes, it really says Southampton!

What range to use?

The instructions explain that it’s a good idea to look back at the last year or two and see what the range of temps your place has. You can see where my spreadsheet came in handy! I went back and counted how many days in each month hit whatever max temperature. For all of 2020 and 2021. Yea, I really LOVE spreadsheets.

	4	5	6	7
January	1	2	3	
Feb		1	2	
March	1		2	4
April	1	1	1	2
May				
June				

This is just a random chunk of the spreadsheet. The columns are the maximum high (in Celsius) reached that day. So in April 2021, one day the max was 4*C, and 2 days it was 7*C etc. May and June didn’t have any max temps this low; whereas January didn’t ever hit 7* or higher!

My spreadsheet goes from “-7 or less” to “31 or more” though from -2 to 30 it goes up by one degree at a time so I ended up with 36 different colours in the final range.

Climbing Goat’s designer – Clare Bray – included six different colour charts with the pattern. So you’re covered if you want to use 16 colours or 36 or really anywhere in between. Which I think is kinda awesome.

And then my mind turned to the fabric…

How could I resist?!? It’s NAMED Galaxy! Handdyed fabric from the amazing Mystic Fabrics

Spreadsheet ready to track temperatures ✔️

Threads assigned to temperature ✔️

Fabric – sorted ✔️

So now all I have to pull out the threads (and order the four I am missing) and I’m ready to go. Well, except it’s not January 1 yet!

I’m not certain I will stitch on this everyday – though that itself would be fun to take pictures of…

(note: I included links where I could because I love supporting artists and creative people etc. I did not receive anything for doing this and, in fact, I didn’t even tell them I was doing this until it was done; which is basically what I always do…)

(note #2: looking back at my “planning for planning” post I realised that I didn’t include EITHER of the CGD patterns in my goals. So I guess I should add them!)

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