Chugging Forward
I have not re-abandoned the knitting blog! But there's not really a lot of progress to show when you're busy at work and end up with only an hour a night to knit, and you're working on a ten (down to seven) color fair isle sweater on size 1 needles. What I have is lovely, but it's not much to look at yet. On the plus side, I haven't gotten bored or frustrated with it yet, which is also why there aren't any interim smaller projects to post about. And even if my camera batteries weren't depleted, so far I've knit one full repeat of the pattern, which means at this moment Venezia looks exactly like the swatch I posted below, except it's a big band instead of just a 72-stitch swatch.
My only quandary so far has been deciding whether or not to separate and rejoin the different colors between the rounds where they are needed. The finished product would be much neater if I did this, and if I run all seven colors up the side at all times, that adds a bit of odd bulk to that one area of the sweater. On the other hand, it's three or four extra strands (in almost all cases it would still make sense to be running one or two of them without snipping) of fingering weight yarn so the bulk is pretty negligible, it will make finishing a heck of a lot easier, and I am already pushing the limits of the yarn requirements (I ended up making one size larger than I planned, and I'm adding an extra 2.5" to the length of the body) so leaving them connected gives me the greatest chance of not having to order another ball of whatever color I am most likely to run out of.
Which means it is the least portable project ever, with its tangle of seven balls of yarn.