My chat this week in the comments on Audrey with rontuaru (about Alice Starmore and Kaffe Fassett patterns and knitting in days of yore) got me to thinking about The Beast again. I knit this Kaffe Fassett design – which is really called The Chinese Rose Coat – around 1990. It’s in the book Glorious Color, sort of. (That’s a Ravelry link. This is the 1988 edition, which is the one that I have. The book was reprinted in 1990 with a different cover.) What’s actually in Glorious Color are instructions for The Chinese Rose Jacket, then there’s a note that you could make it into a coat by using the chart for the jacket and the pattern for the Jug Coat.

Before I get going, here are some Ravelry links for those patterns:
The Chinese Rose Coat.
The Chinese Rose Jacket.
The Jug Coat.

These sweaters are all big squares, which is great for intarsia designs but not so great for a flattering fit. (If you look on Ravelry, you’ll see that the Jug Coat is one-size-fits-all and finishes out at 44″ across the bust, so there have been other changes in pattern design in forty years, too.) The coat is a big T – you cast on at the bottom back hemline and knit up, adding stitches for the sleeves (to make that T), then continue up to the top of the shoulders. Then you split the work in the middle, continuing down the fronts, decreasing to end the sleeves at the underarm and casting off at the front hem. You sew the side seams, pick up stitches at the hem to add ribbing, then add ribbing to the cuffs too. I remember what a huge pile I had in my lap at the end.

Here’s the spread from the book with the coat on the left and the jacket on the right.

Kaffe’s suggestion was that you should mix many yarns together for the coat, even twisting two lighter weight yarns together to get a thicker yarn. I did that. Mine is a big mixy-mixy of colours and textures, which is a lot of fun. There are even fringe yarns and sparkly yarns in there. I don’t remember what the fiber mix is, but it’s certainly not all wool or even natural fibres. I bought odd balls of yarn in yarn shops all over the place for this coat.

Here’s my coat:

I’m not tall enough to even get all of it in one picture!

I didn’t use one black yarn for the background but mixed a bunch of them, including a fur one and some grey ones. The one thing that bugs me is that the chenille yarn I used for the collar and cuffs seems to be aging badly – each time I pull out The Beast, there are more loose loopy bits there. I guess there’s some content with elastic that’s losing its boing (?)

I also wasn’t really good about checking gauge in those days. Most things I knit then were too big or too small. This coat was and is ginormous. It’s a bit shorter now because I took the ribbing and one repeat off the hem as soon as it was sewn together. I’m just not tall enough for how big it was. This also eliminated the ribbing at the hem, which isn’t a bad thing if you want to walk in the coat. I added facings down the front, knit my ribbed collar and cuffs in black chenille and ultimately added bias tap inside the collar (at the base of the ribbing) and from collar to cuff where the shoulder seam could have been to keep the monster from always getting bigger. Part of this is a gauge issue. Some of it is just weight. The original design was supposed to be worn open, more like a cape than a coat, but I added buttons and loops on the front. I also added pockets in the side seams, which are awesome.

It is a sweater to wear on a perfect fall day with just the right temperature and no wind. As a result, it mostly gets action when the mister is very sick, which doesn’t happen very often. He’s the one who called it The Beast and he’s convinced that it’s the warmest possible blanket when he’s not feeling well.

There was one fun incident with this sweater. It used to be possible to fly from Toronto to New York City for the day – there were a lot of flights and it’s not that far, so you could catch the 7AM flight, be in the city by 9:30, meet someone for coffee, someone else for lunch, someone else for a coffee and maybe even a fourth person for a drink, then head back to the airport to catch the 6PM or 7PM flight home. At LaGuardia, the Air Canada people always put you on the next possible flight, if you were interested. I used to go down to meet with my editors. In 1998, I was going to hire an agent and had narrowed it to two possibilities but wanted to meet them both to decide. I flew down for the day. I also had appointments with both of my editors that day, so it was busy. It was in the fall, a gorgeous sunny day, and I wore The Beast. I was so excited when two women stopped me on the street to talk about it because they recognized it as a Kaffe Fassett pattern. Obviously they were knitters, and we had a lovely chat on 7th Ave. (or maybe 5th) in the sunshine. Their enthusiasm made my day.

I also made the Chinese Rose Jacket for my SIL in the mid-90s. I was a lot more careful with gauge and much more disciplined with my yarn choices. I used one yarn for each colourway and the same black tweed for the whole jacket. I remember that it came out really well but I don’t have any pictures of it. (Maybe I’ve embellished the memory. LOL!) Next time I’m at her place, I’ll try to remember to take a pic of it.

Here are my Ravelry project pages for The Beast and for The Chinese Rose Jacket.