The Oh-my-god-I-must-be-freakin'-insane project

Obviously the huge pile of current WIPs from the last post isn't enough for me because I'm planning to embark on the most ridiculously complicated project I've ever considered. I've been listening to the Craftlit podcast recently - audiobooks are very good for handsewing I've found - and Heather mentioned that she was working on Vogue's Map of the World Afghan (actually she mentioned this in a podcast from about 3 years ago - I have quite a bit of catching up to do). I wanted to see what it looked like so I looked it up on Ravelry, and yes, it is an entire map of the world charted in blanket form:

And then I discovered that Vogue Knitting have it online for free and I started thinking about it. I'm not sure why, I don't even really like how it's styled. I like the bright colours in the countries but I think it's kind gaudy in the edges, and I really don't like the points and tassels, but I couldn't get it out of my head for some reason. Aaaand then I started looking at suitable yarn substitutes and found Debbie Bliss Donegal Aran Tweed as a perfect British alternative. And then I was kinda sorta looking up how much donegal tweed cost, just to kill time you understand, and I found out there were a lot of shades recently discontinued and now on sale on various websites for about half price, and, well...I cracked.

Yup, that's a LOT of yarn. But to be fair, this is probably going to occupy me for about 10 years, so a complete bargain really (off topic, I was saying this to my boyfriend as I was paying for it and he said "you know, you really don't need to justify your yarn purchases to me". I am going to marry this man*) The colours are a leetle bit brighter than the picture, but not quite so obnoxiously luminous as the original. The pack of natural coloured yarn at the front is for the edges, and I'm going to leave off the points and just finish it as a rectangle with a non-curling border. Of course, now that I HAVE all the yarn, I won't be casting on a single stitch for at least a month because

a)I am overcomplicating things slightly. For a normal, sane person, this is a great chart, but...err...I have a tendency to get a little...anal about detail. I could see straight away that I wasn't happy with the shape of some of the countries, Britain and Italy for example, and in a few places they'd lumped smaller countries together, for example, they have Central America as one country rather than eight. As I've started going over the chart I've found some really strange mistakes. Not only have they stuck countries together, they've split countries in half. They have actually added fictional borders into this map. I don't understand why they would do that.

Yeah, I know, this makes me crazy obsessive.

b)I'm in way over my head here. I don't know how to do intarsia. I don't just mean I've never done intarsia, I've never done fair isle, but at least I know the theory behind it. I have absolutely no idea where to even start with intarsia. It scares me slightly. Nice simple project to start off with then.

c) Oh yeah, and there's the other 11 projects already on the go. Best start knitting faster.


*No Mother, that is not your cue to buy a hat.