My knitting bag runneth over

This, my friends, is the sad sad state of my knitting bag.  Inside this bag are the yarn and/or swatches for seven of my designs, plus a shawl for my friend's wife who is going to have their baby any day now.  It's crazy!  It just hit me as I typed that...seven designs in some stage of progress or another.  That's nothing compared to what is in my sketch book right now.  And as you can see I'm having fun with color now that I picked up the color selection wheel.  It definitely makes choosing colors easier for me.  I have a hard time picking a color but I know what I like so having this handy little tool pointing me in the right direction helps me to eliminate things that I know for sure won't work well together. 

Also, you know what I said about four hours of sleep and math?  Well, I got up this morning and realized that my repeats are about 12 stitches less than my swatch and that I figured the numbers incorrectly... again.  I had about 8 stitches too many, and I had to rip back and start again.  This time I took the total number of stitches in my swatch and multiplied by 6 (I want the blanket to be 6 swatches wide) and divided that by the number of stitches in the pattern repeat to see how many of those would fit in 6 swatches.  Still with me?  I ended up with a fraction so I rounded down to the nearest whole number.  Then I added the 12 stitches left over in the swatch so that it ends with the same stitch section it starts with (going for balance here), and I got more stitches than it would take to knit 6 repeats of my entire swatch.  Too many stitches, project too big, not enough yarn.  So, I decided to go with one less pattern repeat and do it all over again.  After I got a number, I added 4 stitches (2 on each side) and another 10 stitches for the border (5 on each side). 

Now I am not a math genius, even though I aced college algebra and statistics, and I have screwed up these numbers three different times, so I decided to check my math in a much simpler way.  I added all the numbers together to see if I got the same number.  5 + 2 + (pattern repeats) + 12 remaining sts for balance + 2 + 5 = the same number I got before!  Yes!  But I still don't trust myself so I cast on the total number, and as I knit the first row, I placed markers after every section to make sure I had the correct number of sections and didn't have any stitches left over.  Success!!  So now I'm on course and I'm going to plug away at this project and see what happens.  I should be safe for about 22 rows, lol.  I have achieved balance in my project.  I wonder if I can achieve balance in my life?  It's unlikely, lol.  Oh, here's a sneak peak at the super-secret project: