Mitered square blanket

Original publish date, May 18, 2019
This project has outgrown the Basket-of-Currently-Working-On, and lives in one of those folding knitting baskets of yesteryear... and I mean yesteryear, it's turned wood dowels and in all honesty, is at least on its third fabric basket incarnation  - the one I removed because it was literally disintegrating looked to be circa 1970s.  

Back to the knitting project. 
[If you're on Ravelry, here's a link to my project page for this blanket]

Yes, there's a story behind why I started this, but I don't remember what it was. Probably something to do with having leftover bits of worsted wool from projects and not wanting to make a scrap hat/scarf/whatever. A friend cleaning out her stash gave me the natural colored wool, two skeins of Lion Brand's Natural Fisherman's Wool in Oatmeal. She had already used some of it to make wool dryer balls, but I wasn't in the mood to nit-pick over free wool... She had also tried dying said wool a vibrant amethyst purple, which had a negative impact on the wool fibers [you can see an exemplar of that wool sample in the middle row, third square down from the top]. Every few inches the yarn either grew thin or one of the plys had disappeared altogether, needing to be cut and rejoined.  

I started out not actually knitting mitered squares but trying to knit squares as samples of stitches. Which didn't last long, they weren't uniform in size and there were issues with the gauge I was too lazy to work out. 

The squares themselves are fast and easy to knit up. 
Some things that were not easy - 
Remembering that I was using size 6 US needles. [Update, 2/8/2020 - I'm glad I made note of this, it seems I've been condo knitting this project with anything between a 6 and a 9! >_<]
Remembering exactly how many stitches were in each square - 25, if you're curious. 
Remembering which side to begin the cast on so that the little miter ridges aligned - yes, it matters, and I had no idea for the first 4 rows or so what I was doing. 

The squares don't take a lot of yarn, at least knitting up a 3" square with size 6 needles and 25 stitches. I believe my initial thought was to use scraps of wool up but to be honest, I don't have that much wool laying around, and the thought of having this thing laying about unfinished for potentially years was an unpleasant thought. I started looking for scrap ends of wool yarn. 

any idea how hard it is to find scrap ends of yarn? pretty darn. 

Enter [shameless plug] Jimmy Bean's Wool and their 15-yard samples of Malabrigo worsted - and 15 yards is still more than enough for one of these little squares. I've purchased 29 different samples, and I think I'm finally close to maxing out this source of scrap [what am I doing with the leftover leftovers? Turning it into a giant yarn ball...].

Here are some picture updates! Okay. One picture update, one that's really of my cat, but you can sort of see the texture and the colors. I will have to take some close up pictures of some of the squares.