Jack’s Back Stripe is one of my favourite Kaffe Fassett patterns. This is the first Jack’s Back project I did (and my second Kaffe Fassett project). I must have made this sometime in the late 1980’s, I don’t remember exactly when. The garment is knitted all in one piece, from cuff to cuff. It is done in Fair-Isle technique with 2 colors per row.

This is my favourite Fall/Winter jacket and I wear it pretty often between August and April. I wanted to do something to remind me of the Fall colours in New England, so I chose yarns from that colour palette. This has about 100 different yarns in it - a combination of wool, mohair, cotton, chenille, and silk. I used a lot of worsted and bulky weight yarns and often combined 2 thinner yarns to get roughly the weight I wanted.

Since the jacket has gotten a lot of use over the last 25 years, I’ve had to repair it every few years. In my opinion this demonstrates one of the great advantages of knitting with so many colors/yarns. I can always repair the garment using whatever I happen to have around, and I don’t need to worry about exactly matching the original yarns!