2026 Temperature Quilt, Version 2

Back in January I shared a post about my plans for a 2026 Temperature Quilt. I had such a good time making my 2025 Temperature Quilt that I was eager to start a new one. I decided at that time to keep it easy and started to piece a Herringbone Quilt. This section represents the highs and lows for the first 9 days of 2026.

Well, that plan didn't last long. Just a day or two after that blog post, I was talking to my sister Karen, who is also a quilter. She was considering making a temperature quilt, and we discovered that we were both very intrigued by a design by Jo Avery. The next photo is Jo's 2022 Sea Urchin temperature quilt.

I discovered that Jo teaches an online workshop that includes the Sea Urchin design, her Supernova class at The Thread House Academy. We both got signed up for the class and began our separate versions of this amazing quilt.

I'm using most of the same fabrics for my Sea Urchin quilt as last year's temperature quilt which are  Glaze and Glaze II by Libs Elliott for Andover Fabrics. Here's my color palette for the 2026 quilt. The hot pink diamond at the bottom center represents the hottest temps, over 100 degrees, and they go down in increments of 3 degrees, with the grey for the lowest temps. The black solid will be my background.

Jo's method for making this design involves drawing it out on light-weight non-fusible interfacing, which becomes the foundation for the piecing and is not removed from the blocks. The fact that the shapes are a little wonky and vary in size makes it easier to deal with the fact that the  number of days varies from month to month. Here is the pieced area of my January block from both the right and wrong sides.

The last steps for finishing the January block were adding the black background around the outside and at the center. I machine pieced the outer background to the foundation-pieced section, then hand appliqued the center. 

This is my block for January, 2026. The tiny safety pin in the top  segment marks January 1st, and the days move clockwise around the block. The outer wedges represent the daily high temperatures, and the inner wedges are the lows.

I have the foundation piecing done for the February block and need to get the four quadrants of it joined together before I can add the background. Karen and I are going to get together this weekend, and I can't wait to see how different our blocks look. My block represents the temperatures for the Atlanta airport, our nearest weather station, and hers will be for Madison, WI. We are not using the same fabrics, but our colors are similar.

I'm  linking up with:

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs

Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter

Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Brag About Your Beauties at From Bolt to Beauty

Happy quilting everyone!

Julie in GA