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Dad spends 104 days knitting baby's sleep patterns into a blanket

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"There's nothing quite like the feeling of someone loving the thing you made for them"
"There's nothing quite like the feeling of someone loving the thing you made for them"

Crafty dad Seung Lee recently tweeted a pic of this lovely baby's blanket, featuring blue and white stripes, but what makes it really amazing is that the stripes represent the first-year sleep patterns of his little boy.

The American dad collected his son's sleep data with the BabyConnect app and used JavaScript and Python to convert the data into a knitting pattern.

He then spent about 300 hours (over 104 days) knitting what he calls The Sleep Blanket, which consists of about 185,000 stitches. Blue represents asleep, and grey awake. 

A labour of love:

The blanket depicts the boy's first year, but Lee only completed the blanket when his son turned two. "I started planning/designing after his first birthday. There were many different versions/methods that I abandoned because they either didn't work at all or didn't convey the data clearly," he explains. 

"I also had to refresh myself on knitting, learn double knitting, write the scripts for transforming the data, and build the tracker tool. There was just a ton of prep work and practice before I had any live stitches on needles."  

Lee reveals "there's a bit of empty data at the beginning because those first few days were rough. I wrote some of it down but it never made it into the app. The incomplete data breaks my heart and will haunt me for the rest of my life."

An entirely different kind of labour, but a labour of love none-the-less.

Have you made something beautifully personal for your family? 

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Share your crafty creations with us, and we could publish your pics. Anonymous contributions are always welcome.

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Read more:

How new fathers use social media to make sense of their roles

Fun and affordable hobbies to try with your kids this year

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