Dad Knits Blankets Using Data From Infant Sleep Tracker
One Seattle father found a creative and scientific way to handle the sleep deprivation of having a baby: He created a meticulous blanket representing every moment of sleeping and waking during his children's first years.
The mesmerizing result shows the chaos of newborn days (and nights) gradually turning into a somewhat steady sleep and nap schedule. His daughter, now 2, inspired the purple-and-white blanket that charted her rest and waking periods.
"A visualization of my daughter’s sleep pattern from birth to her first birthday," Seung Lee, an I.T. specialist, tweeted in April. "Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep."
The Sleep Blanket, Mark 2
A visualization of my daughter’s sleep pattern from birth to her 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 #knitting #crochet #dataviz pic.twitter.com/m3VQqCBGo1— Seung Lee (@Lagomorpho) April 7, 2022
The 83-day design was completed using data from the @BabyConnect app, an infant tracker that archives behavior like eating and sleeping.
This wasn't the only time Lee took a scientific stab at parenting.
He did the same thing when his now-5-year-old son was born, tracking his sleep patterns with the same app to decrease his parenting anxiety, and created a blue-and-gray blanket.
“You can read as many books as you want and take in all the advice that’s given, but so much of that goes out the window when you have a crying baby in your arms in the middle of the night and you don’t know why,” Lee, 40, told TODAY Parents.
“My wife and I are like-minded about making decisions based on data so we both strongly committed to using a tracking app," he added. "It was sort of a relief that most of the time, babies are pretty predictable.”
The Sleep Blanket
A visualization of my 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 #knitting #crochet #datavisualization pic.twitter.com/xwBh7vIilJ— Seung Lee (@Lagomorpho) July 12, 2019
Lee knew how to crochet, having taught himself 10 years ago to make stuffed animals for his nieces and nephews.
He realized though, the bulk of the blanket would have to be knit.
“Crochet stitches are much larger and don’t line up vertically as neatly as knitting does,” explained Lee, who taught himself to knit by watching YouTube videos.
"Blue is asleep and gray is awake on the ‘front’ side, reversed on the back," he explained of the color choice.
The sleep data was collected with the @babyconnect BabyConnect app which lets you export to CSV. The CSVs were filtered and converted into JSON (using Google Apps Script and Python) which could then be used for visualization and tracking pic.twitter.com/IjRpXXnlKE
— Seung Lee (@Lagomorpho) July 12, 2019
I built a tool in HTML/JavaScript so I could position stitch markers for the color changes and track overall progress. I made it browser based so I could pull it up on any device wherever I washttps://t.co/AAQ6JWBnrj pic.twitter.com/GNSnGZ29pz
— Seung Lee (@Lagomorpho) July 12, 2019
The blanket took almost four months to make and required 185,000 stitches in total. After working on it for 300 hours (excluding time spent strategizing) Lee completed the quilt right before his son's second birthday.
Despite his meticulous dedication, Lee admits sleepy oversights (on his part) irk him.
"There’s a bit of empty data at the beginning because those first few days were rough," he tweeted. "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."
How to 'read' the blanket: It's top down, left to right. Top row is the day he was born, bottom row is his first birthday. Leftmost stitch is 12:00am. Rightmost stitch is 11:54pm. Blue is asleep and gray is awake on the 'front' side, reversed on the back
— Seung Lee (@Lagomorpho) July 13, 2019
After finishing his daughter's blanket this year, Lee revealed them side-by-side. "It's really striking to see how different the patterns are despite both having the same progression of chaos coalescing into distinct nap times," he tweeted.
Looking at my daughter's blanket side by side with my son’s, it’s really striking to see how different the patterns are despite both having the same progression of chaos coalescing into distinct naptimes pic.twitter.com/euUXDuWkKX
— Seung Lee (@Lagomorpho) April 7, 2022
Lee's children are in school now and with Halloween approaching, the pressure is on for this creative dad.
"I am trying to make my son a costume based on a character from the Super Metroid video game," said Lee. "First, I need to learn how to work with foam rubber."
This article was originally published on TODAY.com