Tag Archives: felix

Felix Update

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I finished the body of my Felix cardigan – I told you about it last week – and wanted to show you how wonderful it looks.

Felix cardigan knit by Deborah Cooke

This photo is more true to color than last week’s photo. i just love it! I had 80g of the fingering weight yarn left, so I split it into two 40g balls. We’ll see how long the sleeves end up being. I might manage to have long sleeves, or they might be 3/4. I’m good with it either way. There’s more yardage in the mohair silk, so the fingering weight yarn will run out first.

I had the perfect buttons in my stash. Here’s a close-up of them:

Felix cardigan knit by Deborah Cooke

You can see all the colours in the yarn in this image, too.

The yarn is knit quite loosely for its thickness, resulting in a very light and drapey fabric. It’s soft and warm. It reminds me of this cardigan, which I knit of Kidsilk Haze Trio. That yarn has three strands of KSH spun together in coordinating colours. It’s discontinued so that’s a Ravelry link. The pattern is called Paige and was designed as a colour-blocked pullover with changing shades of KSH. I knit it all one colour, and split the front to make a long boxy cardigan. My Ravelry project page is here.

Paige by Lisa Richardson, with modifications knit in Kidsilk Haze Trio by Deborah Cooke

But being reminded of this sweater meant I was reminded of something. You can see the gradations in the green sweater in this image and also (aha!) a ball of KSH Trio in Loganberry, which is red.

Felix cardigan knit by Deborah Cooke with two shades of Kidsilk Haze Trio

This has been sitting in my stash because I don’t have enough of it to make a sweater like the green one. I do, however, have more than enough to make another Felix in it—and some coordinating buttons in my stash too. So, I’ll cast on another red cardigan once this grey one is done and the stash will be a little bit smaller.

Another Felix Cardigan

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As I mentioned last week, we went to a knitting event a few weekends ago, and some yarn demanded to be adopted. It’s so pretty that it jumped the queue—even though the sweater isn’t finished, I thought I’d show you the yarn and my progress today.

The yarn is from The Loving Path, an indie dyer, and was put up in a kit for Love Note, a pullover pattern from TinCanKnits. (The dyer’s link goes to Etsy and the pattern link goes to Ravelry.) It included two skeins each of a fingering weight yarn (High Twist Sock) and a mohair silk blend (Aura Lace), both dyed in the same colourway (Bewitched) and intended to be held together to knit the sweater. I wasn’t sure I wanted a pullover but realized once I got home that the yarn combo would work perfectly for the Felix Cardigan. (Another Ravelry link.) I’ve knit this three times and love it.

Here are my three previous incarnations of Felix:

Felix Cardigan by Amy Christoffers knit in Rowan Renew by Deborah Cooke
Felix in Rowan Renew
Felix Cardigan by Amy Christoffers knit in Rowan Renew by Deborah Cooke
Felix in Rowan Renew
Felix knit in Noro Cyochin by Deborah Cooke
Felix in Noro Cyochin

Felix is a shorter boxy cardigan, knit top-down with a lovely eyelet detail on the raglan increases. All three of these were knit with a single strand of Aran weight yarn. These two yarns together will be more like a DK weight, but Love Note is knit on even larger needles than Felix. The result is a lacy airy fabric, like this:

Felix cardigan, in progress, knit by Deborah Cooke in yars by The Loving Path

The fabric is soft and squishy, and as light as a cloud. I just love all the gradations in this hand-dyed yarn. It’s all silvers, greys, blacks with hints of turquoise, blue and pink. This looks lighter than the actual yarn in real life. It was a dingy day so I added a lot of light, which means you can see the colours but the shot is slightly over-exposed. It really appears as a smoky black with flicks of other colors. I have some buttons in my stash which perfectly mirror that combination, too.

Another great thing about this is that I’ve known for a while that I need a black cardigan. I have a Hebrides on my needles in solid black Kidsilk Haze but haven’t made a lot of progress—since I tend to knit at night while watching TV, thin black yarn isn’t the best choice for my eyeballs. I’m almost half done this Felix in a week, so (as long as it doesn’t get stuck on Sleeve Island) I should have that black cardigan soon. I’ll show it to you when it’s done.

And finally a bit about admin. I feel the need for a little more organization here on the blog. I’ve been cutting back on my online time (which had crept upward during the pandemic) and am spending more time with my many projects. This is all good but I’ve ventured beyond just knitting. As projects near completion, I want a plan for posts. I’ll keep knitting posts on Wednesdays but will put sewing posts on Fridays and anything related to dolls on Mondays. That should give you an idea what to expect when you visit.

Another Felix – in Noro Cyochin

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I had so many fingering-weight projects on my needles last year that it felt as if they were all taking forever. For a quick break, I cast on another Felix cardigan, this time in Noro Cyochin. (That’s a Ravelry link – Cyochin is discontinued now.)

Iced Blackberry designed by Claudia Wersing in Noro Cyochin

I bought this Noro when I fell in love with this poncho, called Iced Blackberry. It was designed by Claudia Wersing, specifically for Noro Cyochin, which is a blend of wool, mohair and silk. I bought the same colourway as shown in the pattern photo – that’s the picture from the Noro book, Sweet Winter.

Here’s Sweet Winter on the website of the distributor, Knitting Fever, so you can see all the patterns included in it. They were all designed by Claudia Wersing. This is her website, which is in German.

I love this poncho and bought the book for this one pattern, but partway through knitting it, I realized I’d never wear it. I love the look of ponchos, capes and stoles, but I never wear them. I didn’t want to waste the Cyochin, though.

Tithe by Jane Ellison knit in Noro Cyochin by Deborah Cooke

I ripped it out and then knit a Jane Ellison sweater called Tithe. (That’s a Ravelry link. My finished sweater is on the right.) This pattern is included in a book called Noro Unlimited – that’s a link to Knitting Fever – which includes all Jane Ellison designs. This is her website. I got gauge but the fabric was a bit stiffer than I wanted. I discovered that I don’t really like sweaters with 3/4 sleeves or floppy lapels. If it’s warm enough for a bulky sweater, I want long sleeves! And the lapels drove me a bit nuts. This one lasted long enough for a picture before it was frogged.

I have learned (alas!) that my taste in sweaters is deeply conventional.

I really like both of my Felix cardigans (here’s the red one and here’s the green one) so last fall I cast on a third with my Noro Cyochin. It spent some time on Sleeve Island, as all of my sweaters do, but I finished it up last week. Here’s the finished sweater:

Felix knit in Noro Cyochin by Deborah Cooke

I like the fabric better than the Tithe sweater since it’s knit at a looser gauge. It’s nice and soft. I had lots of yarn but couldn’t get matchy-matchy – of all my skeins of Cyochin, I had only one run of those turquoise-y blues. The Cyochin seems to have more variation skein-to-skein than other Noro yarns I’ve used – that run of icy green doesn’t appear in every ball either. The sleeves couldn’t be matched – and yes, I thought about ripping it out for a while. I do like it, though – it’s comfy, warm and purple – so this one is a win.

I’m currently in the Land of Use-It-Up with my knitting wool leftovers, so next week, I’ll show you what I knit of the remaining Cyochin.

Felix, A New Sweater

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I recently finished a new cardigan with yarn from my stash. Now that it’s blocked and finished, let’s have a look.

Felix Cardigan by Amy Christoffers knit in Rowan Renew by Deborah CookeThe pattern is Felix, (that’s a Ravelry link) a boxy top-down raglan cardigan with a nice detail on the raglan increases. It knits up pretty quickly and, since it’s knit top-down, you can try it on as you go to check the fit. I used Rowan Renew, a discontinued yarn with a tweedy fleck. (That’s a Ravelry link for the yarn, since it’s not on Rowan’s website anymore.) The yarn is made of recycled wool – hence the name – which is pretty cool.

I really like that raglan detail and I love this yarn. It has a subtle stripe as well as the tweedy fleck.

Felix Cardigan by Amy Christoffers knit in Rowan Renew by Deborah CookeThe red colourway is called Pick-up, but I didn’t have enough of it for the whole sweater. I added the dark grey, also Renew, in the colourway Lorry, and modified the pattern to have striped edges in garter stitch. It turned out that I used 1.4 balls of grey and had 1 ball of red left over, so I could have almost made it all red. The buttons came from my stash, too. I like the leaves on them for this sweater, since the red reminds me of autumn colours.

Here’s my Ravelry project page for this sweater.

In addition to modifying the ribbed hems and button band to be garter stripes, I made the sleeves narrower at the cuff. I like the narrower sleeves on my Koigu Lunenberg cardigan. This was all good until I washed the sweater to block it. It stretched like mad! I put it flat to dry but knew all that extra length wasn’t going to just disappear – so I tossed it into the dryer when it was still damp. This meant that the wool fulled as the sweater shrank back to its original length. It’s thicker and softer than it was, which is good, but it’s also a little bit narrower. The sleeves still fit, but I can’t push them up as much as I like to. (Maybe this will break my bad habit…) I’m curious about this stretching and wonder whether it had something to do with the wool having been recycled. (?)

Either way, I’ve cast on another Felix in Rowan Renew in a green colourway called Digger. I have twelve balls of this colour and the sweater takes 11.5 so it can all be one colour. I’ll make the sleeves a few stitches wider at the cuff on this one, in case the same thing happens when it’s washed. I haven’t decided whether to rib the cuffs and button band, like the pattern, or do them in moss stitch. Here’s that Ravelry project page.

What do you think?