I love the Jack’s Back stripe pattern from Kaffe Fassett. It is a 2-color per row Fair-Isle pattern with an Arab/Oriental look to it. This is one of my favorite patterns and I’ve already done a jacket and a waistcoat back using it. I always wanted to do socks with it, but wasn’t sure that I had enough different color variations in thin sock yarns to make it work. A few years ago, I had accumulated enough sock yarns that I thought I could give it a try. I played around and came up with a pattern based on the Jack’s Back stripe and made these socks. I’m quite pleased at how they turned out and I will definitely be making more like this.

I’ve probably used about 40 different yarns in this project, but it is all standard 75/25 (wool/nylon) sock yarn. In each colored stripe I’ve used 4 to 5 different yarns. The right and left are similar, but not identical.