Little Mischief: Still Not Behaving

This little guy is just bent on finding ways to annoy me.  Well guess what, buddy?  I'm not annoyed!  (Much.)

Here's my problem:

(I apologize for the truly terrible lighting.  That room is impossible to take pictures in, and the one with flash was all the wrong color.)

You probably don't see the problem.  Let me explain.  My gauge for double crochet in Caron Simply Soft on a size H hook is half an inch per row.  Has been since I picked up the stuff to make my newborn cousin a granny square blanket nearly two years ago. (Wait what? It's been nearly two years? He's almost two??)  When I worked a little sample to see what the fabric was going to look like, it seemed to measure 1.5 inches for three rows. So I fully expected the twenty-four rows I'd completed at the time of the above picture to measure twelve inches.

Obviously, they don't.

I'm getting 0.3534 inches per row, according to my maths today (when I was getting 10.25 inches for 29 rows, not counting the 0.25 inches for the single crochet row at the bottom).  Which is only about 70% of what I expected.  That means my blanket would only be about 70% done when I "finished" my calculated number of rows.

Obviously, that wouldn't work.

So back to the silly drawing board.  Honestly, my notes for this in OneNote look like I'm a crazy person.  It doesn't help that I don't put them in a neat column, but start a new section of text just anywhere on the page when I need to do different calculations, so I can drag them around and put the bits I need right now over here, and the bits that pertain to that thing over there...

So anyway.  7.67 repeats of my twelve-row pattern isn't going to give me the length I expected, so that plan is out.  Depending on the ratio I want, I can do 8 repeats (which will be just past 3' square), or up to 11 (which will be just past 3'x4').

I'm definitely going to need at least one more ball of each of these.  Possibly two.

This project is turning out to be an Adventure.