Magnum Opus

This project has been SIX YEARS in the making, and I am so happy to say it's finally finished!

I first started this hand-knitted testament to my insanity in May 2009, when I announced to the blog that instead of working from the already reasonable Vogue Knitting charts I wanted to re-chart Every Single Country to make the map more accurate.  I believe those charts are still available as a pdf here.  However after all that work are they accurate?  No.  No, they are not.  Because this:

Now looks like this:

NOOOO!  Curse you South Sudan!  I'm sure you probably had your reasons for the split, but did any of you think about me?  I don't think so.  I think this happened around about the time that I was knitting the last panel, back in 2011. Never mind, I can always embroider over the top of it later if it really bugs me, but for now I'm just happy that I can actually point to Sudan on a map.

As you can imagine, there were some fairly large chunks of time that I wan't working on this (I know it's big, but I'm not so slow that it took me six solid years to knit), so after knitting the main map on and off for 2 1/2 years I then abandoned it for about a year before sewing it together with a border, and then another 2 years before I got round to actually finishing it.  That was my main worry as I was really nervous about backing it without ruining all the work that I'd put in.  I wanted a wall hanging rather than a blanket, and since this thing is ridiculously heavy there's no way I could get away with hanging it up without stabilising the stretch somehow.  I bought some curtain fabric from Ikea in April, seamed it into one big panel with some hanging loops and then...sat and stared at it for several months.  

In the end I've gone for a mix of strength and neatness, so the edge is attached with 3 rows of machine stitching which sort of disappear into the moss stitch border and the middle, where machine stitching would be visible, is all painstakingly hand sewn to the backing.  This was pretty hard on the fingers so I could only do a few rows a day and it ended up taking a month to finish, but I think that's pretty quick in comparison to all the previous years!

The map has now been hanging up in my living room for 3 months (it was lovingly draped in fairy lights last month), and it still makes me grin every time I come home.  Every meticulous hour I spent charting countries, weaving in ends, embroidering islands and hand quilting the back has been totally and utterly worth it.

Plus every guest to my home now gets a free geography lesson on the side!

USE ALL THE COLOURS!!!

Evening all, how are the trials of winter treating you?  Grumble grumble grumble.  Ok, so it's not proper winter yet and it's actually been unseasonably warm today, but still, ugh. Darkness. My brain is still lingering in the Portuguese sunshine and Daylight Savings really sucks ass.

It could also be that I'm already grumpy because I've had to order new glasses for my tragically ageing eyesight.  Oh for the youthful days when I still had perfect vision.  It's not so bad as I only need them for distance, but that does mean that my job won't pay for them as I don't need them to use a computer.  Booooooo.  I have also learned that when you're a cheapskate who refuses to pay for anything but the cheapest frames there is a very fine line between middle-aged shushy librarian and PAY ATTENTION TO ME I'M SO HIPSTER!  Hopefully I won't utterly hate the glasses when I go to pick them up.

Sooooo, now that I've bitched enough about my own eyes, how about I ruin everyone else's?

Kapow! Are your retinas bleeding?

This little beauty which escaped from the UFO mountain this summer is Posse from Rowan magazine 51, knit in the specified Cotton Glace, which I now HATE with a fiery passion.  It was not easy to weave in these ends, and holy tuna there were thousands of them.

That's just the stripy neckline, so you can imagine how messy the back of the intarsia looks.  Since mercerised cotton doesn't stick to itself like wool does I had to leave a bit of end still attached so it didn't start unravelling - I've tried to strike the balance between so long it drives me crazy and so short it sticks through to the outside.  I've...mostly succeeded but there already a few stragglers which I'm stoically ignoring.

It's also a little on the cropped side which I don't really love, but that might just be because I don't really own a whole lot of suitable clothes to wear with cropped jumpers, so maybe I'll grow to love it.  Or perhaps it'll stretch?  Is that a thing?  How about if I get it really wet and hang weights off the hem?  Hmm. Probably not the best idea. 

This was photographed a while ago, pre tripod and remote, so I managed to persuade Martin to take one decentish picture on my phone before he got bored and wandered off to play truck simulators or something.  So make the most of it, awkward and fuzzy as it is, because I am far too busy skipping around in my Insane Stripes of Joy to take another one.

P.S. If you think this is bright, wait till you see what I'm making right now - it's not for everyday consumption so it doesn't need to be as tasteful and restrained as this was.  Oh god, I can't wait to wear this...

Map of the World charts

Bit of a blog experiment today. Someone on Ravely was reading about my crazy obsessive recharting of the Vogue Map of the World afghan and asked if I could put my new pattern online (the originals are painstakingly drawn out on graph paper). I've never charted anything in Excel before - not for public use anyway, I've never converted a Microsoft document to a PDF, and I've certainly never uploaded anything to be downloaded by others, so I have no idea if this is going to work at all. So, Marni (and anyone else who's interested), please let me know if this works properly.

Knittingwise, I've done about 1 and a third of the charts and I've just finished embroidering the first complete panel.

Yep, all those colourful little blobs next to Australia are the individually french-knotted island clusters of Polynesia. They don't show up on the chart I'm afraid, the whole point being that they would be smaller than a knit stitch, so you have three options

a) Find a map and go insane trying to get them as accurately placed as possible (In the absence of an atlas, I've found Wikipedia pretty useful.)

b) Forget the map and just embroider them on willy-nilly. Go crazy. Make pretty patterns. Maybe spell out some secret message in morse code.

c) Do the sensible thing and ignore the islands completely.

Ok, the original pattern is available online at Vogue, and my new charts - fingers crossed - should be downloadable here:

Map of the World Edited