The ravelled sleave of care

July 12, 2019 7:50 PM

The Sleep Blanket, A visualization of [Seung Lee]'s son's sleep pattern from birth to his first birthday. Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep.

Original Twitter thread.

posted by zamboni (12 comments total)

This is amazing. I did a sleep tracker app with my firstborn and it got too overwhelming so kudos to them for keeping it up for that long. It's also neat seeing the coalescing of naptime into morning and afternoon towards the end of the first year then what looks like will turn into the dropping of the morning nap in the last few weeks!
posted by wilky at 9:13 PM on July 12, 2019

What the hell happened in the last couple of weeks? Just when a regular sleep pattern seemed to have been established.
posted by piyushnz at 10:16 PM on July 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Plane trip somewhere for Xmas maybe? (I just booked a Xmas flight to meet the grandparents for our 5 week old, so the idea of dealing with a 6 month old's jet lag while also very jetlagged is fresh in my mind)
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:00 PM on July 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is beautiful. Not sure what I envy more, the creative talent behind it or all those long uninterrupted stretches of blue from a few months old.
posted by Catseye at 12:04 AM on July 13, 2019 [3 favorites]

This is a great project and a beautiful end product, too. I love these knitted visualizations of data but they don’t always look as nice! (The weather scarves and blankets always look nice though, and I bet your blanket will look lovely, kanata.)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:35 AM on July 13, 2019

Holy hell that's gorgeous. I love it so much. Look at all that work! I love textile projects like this - - not just the data visualization ones, but also projects like the circular shawls representing the night sky. People are so creative with the textile arts, and then at the end also you have a practical blanket.

I need to get knitting again.
posted by sciatrix at 6:03 AM on July 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

Wow.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:24 AM on July 13, 2019

Just as a heads up, Seung Lee’s Twitter indicates he/him pronouns.
posted by joyceanmachine at 7:27 AM on July 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

My initial guess for that discontinuity near the end was daylight savings, but now that you mention it a plane trip to a different time zone would make more sense, since the first day of the shift has the kid staying up really late.
posted by ckape at 10:21 AM on July 13, 2019

Confirmed it’s a trip from the west to east coast. “I thought about adjusting for it but it's part of the story” 😭
posted by CharlesV42 at 10:15 PM on July 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is incredible! So much work went into it, and with a year-old baby, too. Thanks for sharing it!
posted by daisyk at 7:36 AM on July 14, 2019

Just saw this on Twitter, came here to post about it and happy to see someone beat me to it. Suffice it to say, this is amazing. Not only is a great visualization in its own rights, but to make it in a medium that is representative of the data contained in it is magnificent.
posted by noneuclidean at 5:52 PM on July 14, 2019 [1 favorite]