The Ladies' Outing Coat, and a little math

Although I was tempted by the Ladies' Outing Jacket and its seaworthy model, I've settled on the Ladies' Outing Coat from the 1907 edition of The Columbia Book of Yarns. I like its smart double-breasted buttons, puffed sleeves, and fitted silhouette. Unlike the Jacket, with its hem and belt at the natural waist, the Coat is longer and more suitable to my current wardrobe. I could absolutely see myself wearing this with jeans or a skirt, as an outerwear garment or as a sweater.

The pattern is fairly complete in its instructions, with clear descriptions of stitch pattern and construction details, but, typical for patterns of this vintage, is lacking information about gauge. Fortunately, it is written for a 36-38" bust and does include directions for increasing and decreasing the size. Since I want to make sure that the finished product fits as well as possible, I read through the pattern several times and sketched a schematic, filling in the provided stitch counts, decreases/increases, and lengths so that I could clearly see the proportions and sizes of different parts of the pattern. The sweater's back and fronts are knit in one giant piece (no shoulder seams to sew), with some waist shaping and built-in increases for the overlapping double-breasted fronts with folded-down lapels (or revers, as the pattern calls them).

I took my own measurements (36" bust, 28" waist, 36" hips), considered ease and fit requirements (there should be negative ease in the finished piece), and pulled out a (roughly) similarly-shaped sweater that has a fit I like. The overall length of the Outing Coat is 20.5", which matched my existing sweater and so should work just fine. The next step was to calculate my desired gauge and check if the stitch counts at various stages of the pattern would work for me and, if not, figure out what they should be.

So, I knit a swatch in the "reversed rib" pattern of the Coat. I chose Knit Picks' Wool of the Andes sportweight and size 4 needles as a starting point (mostly a guess, at this point). The stitch pattern is an alternating 2x2 rib, with each repeat happening every 22 rows. The resulting swatch, as expected, was super stretchy, which is a big part of the fitted look of the finished garment. I washed and blocked the swatch. Once it's dry, we'll see what it tells me about the next steps!