I'm in a crochet group where a lot of people are doing temp blankets, and one really awesome idea I saw was to do a square for each month, them sew them together into a blanket; that way it isn't so huge and heavy?
The sqiares were made from the center out, though, in rounds, and Im not aure how well that would work in knitting... she went with a count of 31 days per month, and added black to the months with fewer, so the squares would be the same size.