Atta Girl Sweater Cast On (White)

 Yesterday I was in a sacred space and remembered I wanted to knit a white sweater before being there again.  I had been collecting white yarns for months, from time to time, but had not settled on a particular set of yarns to use.  The Atta Girl Sweater designed by Cori of Irocknits was the sweater I had planned to knit. It calls for two strands of DK weight yarn held together to give a nice marled look.  Well, I was planning to hold two whites together for my "marl".  If you go to Ravelry, you will see the particulars about the Atta Girl Sweater.

Yarns I had collected:

1. Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool Worsted 465 yards/227 grams-Natural

2. Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Worsted 110 yards/50 grams-White

3. Knit Picks Palette Fingering 231 yards/50 grams-White

4. Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Worsted 110 yards/50 grams- Cloud

5. Knit Picks Swish DK 123 yards/50 grams-White

6. Harrisville Designs Shear (Merino-Dorset) DK 196 yards/50 grams-Buttermilk

7. Harrisville Designs Shear (Wellscroft Dorset) Fingering/50 grams 161 yards-Oyster

8. Paton's Classic Wool Worsted 194 yards/100 grams-Winter White

9. Briggs and Little Regal 2-ply 272 yards/113 grams-Natural White

10. Briggs and Little Heritage 2-ply 215 yards/113 grams-Natural White

11. Knit Picks Aloft Lace 260 yards/25 grams-White

The two Harrisville yarn amounts don't make sense to me but those are the numbers on the ball bands.

So as you can see, I had collected a lot of yarn and planned originally to make swatches of each of them before starting to knit. I wanted to choose wisely the yarn for the sweater for some reason.

Last night (remembering the coolness) I quickly picked up the Wool of the Andes Worsted-White and the Fisherman's Wool-Natural and just cast on.  After almost two hours of knitting I realized I was going to quickly run out of yarn.  At least I told myself that I did not want to use all these varied yarns to make the sweater. I just wanted two yarns to make the sweater...so what do you do in this case?  I checked to see if I could get the Patons Classic Wool Worsted and the Fisherman's Wool at Michaels.  No luck except online so...Since I had already started with the Wool of the Andes, I ordered more of  that yarn from Knit Picks and expect it to arrive in a week-plus. I also ordered two more Fisherman's Wool from Amazon and expect that next week.  

The Knit Picks? Well, I don't know. I HOPE I actually ordered it but as I am having password/account login problems, I don't know if I actually did place the order so I don't know when it will come.  In the morning (I am writing this at 2:00 AM...) I will call them and see what the scoop is.

So the sweater is on its way.  The reason I am writing this at 2:00 AM is that I woke up thinking about the sweater and realized to make the knitting go faster I needed to re-write the pattern with just my own numbers.  You know how sweaters are written with numbers for every pattern size--and this one has 9 sizes so there are many numbers--so I had circled all the numbers I need for the whole pattern but it was taking ages to go through the  rows of the pattern.

At present  I have Cast On, knitted the 7 short rows, Started the Raglan Shaping and am at Row 9 in that section.  That was when I went to bed last night.  

While rubbing Dear One's back before going to sleep  I was also watching quite a few YouTube videos on spindle spinning and blending boards. I have a good mind to order an Ashford blending board to prepare yarn for spinning on the spindle as well as on the two spinning wheels I have.  Finally I shut off the iPad and went to sleep sometime after 11:00 PM.

Now here I am with the idea to transcribe the pattern for my size. I will do one row here to show what I mean:

Row 9: K2, [YO, K2tog] 6 times, K1, M1R, SM,K2, SM, M1L, K13, M1R, SM, K2, SM, M1L, K1, [YO, K2tog] 12 times, K1, M1R, SM, K2, SM, M1L, K13, M1R, SM, K2, SM, M1L, K1, [YO, K2tog] 6 times, K2.  98 sts.

When I counted that row--the main reason I had gone to bed when I did was that my count was 99 stitches. I could not see where I had made the mistake.  Just this moment after transcribing the pattern and counting the row again, I FOUND the mistake.  AND it was an extra YO just two stitches before the end of the row!!  How good is that?!  So easy to fix.  Now I just want to pick up the needles and keep going but will exercise a little restraint and just transcribe more rows. Then go back to bed.  Or pick up the table. Or wash a few dishes.  But I had better go to bed as there are several pressing appointments in the morning.

This is what the sweater looks like so far:

What you see on the right is some of the sleeve stitches. The lace work is the back.  The same lace is on both fronts. In case I did not say, this is a cardigan.  Since my last three failed sweaters are pullovers, I think I will just make cardigans for a while. If I knit more than the class cardigan and this temple cardigan for myself.  

You can also see a corner of the white project bag I made out of one yard of fabric and a 22' zipper.  Some day I will put that pattern up here because it is a great bag which is so easy to make.  I have ten or eleven of them in different colors...should be enough for anyone's on-the-needles projects, don't you think?!