This is the first Kaffe Fassett project I ever knit. After getting the book, “Glorious Knits” I looked at all patterns and couldn’t really decide what to make first. My mother had given me access to her stash and I found a lot of Rya rug wool in a wide range of colors. I felt this would make a perfect base for something really big, so I decided to try the Carpet Coat. The instructions call for about 1,6 kg of yarn, but due to the weight of the Rya rug wool, this coat probably weighs more than 2 kg! The coat has about 60 different colors in it, about half of that is Rya rug wool. The rest is a mix of yarns in different weights: bulky, worsted, etc. I usually used 2 different strands together (unless the yarn was really thick) and there’s a bit of mohair and silk in there as well.

Due to the size of the project I ended up knitting this in my living room on the couch. Don’t misunderstand me: I wasn’t sitting on the couch, the yarn was :-) I sat in a chair facing the couch! I made 2 big piles of yarn: one of light colors on one side of the couch, and another of dark colors on the other side. The project took me several months to knit, but if I remember correctly I was unemployed at the time, so it was a good distraction. I must have made this around 1986.

The coat is extremely warm. Because of that there aren’t many opportunities to wear it. When I knit the coat I was living in North Carolina and I hardly ever wore it. We moved back to New England and I used to wear it a lot in the cold winters. Since we moved to Germany in the ’90s it hardly ever gets cold enough to wear it here, so it spends a lot of time on the couch or on the bed. In the winter my wife likes to wrap herself in the coat to keep warm. It had a ribbed edge at the bottom, but this frayed over time and I recently removed it which makes the coat easier to use as a blanket. I may put the ribbing back on at some point.

I always enjoyed wearing the coat because it attracts a lot of attention.