These little things are addicting

I have been following The Heathen Housewife's mitered square blanket project for awhile now. She started it, and then asked The Yarn Harlot to ask the knitblogosphere to send her more sock yarn scraps. I sent her some scraps of Regia self-striping, and eventually got the idea to use my Koigu and CTH yarns for a blanket. Well, last night, I started my first block. I am now on my third. I've started to get the hang of the cast-on, using my cotton rug warp weaving yarn aka blue string aka leader yarn, for the provisional cast-on over a size 5 needle.

So far I've figured out that I want my blanket to be the same size as my khaki and red plaid couch blanket, so I need 15 blocks with a 31 stitch cast-on as the base line. There will need to be 20 rows of blocks. I am planning to use fingering weight, handpaint, merino wool yarns, preferably 2-ply. I'm not sure how many squares I will get out of the almost-50 grams I have of each of the two Koigus, but if it is one row, then I will get 2 rows of my Koigu (one of each color) and 4 rows of CTH (100 gram balls = twice as many rows). 6 rows does not equal 20 rows. I also have 100 gram sets of striping Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock from the studio sale to the WCKG in the spring. There are 3 colors there (red-orange, green-blue and charcoal-purple), so that would give me 6 more rows of colors so I'd be up to 12. I would also need to work out the textural difference between the 3-ply, wool-nylon LLSS and the 2-ply, 100% superwash merino, CTH and Koigu.

All of this knit-rambling makes me think that I should knit my first ball of yarn up into as many squares as I can to see how far it goes. If I get 20 squares, then I'll knit the blanket that way, if I don't even get to 15 squares, then I'll refigure the numbers. If I get to 20 squares, then I'll only need 150 more grams of yarn to make a whole blanket. I'm guessing that I will find some yarn on sale or hiding in a stash by then that fits the situation.

Here is an idea for a stripe sequence:
Koigu 1
LL 1
CTH 1
LL 2
CTH 2
LL 3
LL3
CTH 2
LL 2
CTH 1
LL 1
Koigu 2

I think that this will accent the textural differences in the two yarns in an interesting way. Or maybe I should just use this as an excuse to buy lots of single skeins of hand dyed koigu-esque sock yarn. Well, I've got at least 90 squares before I have to get more koigu-esque if I decide to nix the Lorna's.

I'm going to stop rambling now, so that I can have some sleep in me before work tomorrow. This week is going to be the end of me, I think.