Zebra Fringed Barn Jacket

When I was in first grade I had a classmate who wore a rabbit fur coat that all the girls in my class simply adored. (This was in the 1970s, OK, so wearing fur wasn’t yet culturally verboten.) All I can remember about this girl now is that her name was Elaina and she was of Russian descent. She spoke English with a Russian accent, and to the rest of us 6-year-olds who had never heard a foreign accent like that before, all the words she spoke sounded deliciously exotic to our ears.

As I recall her jacket was made with either a white-mottled-with-black rabbit fur or dalmatian rabbit fur. It was mostly white with black spots. In my mind’s eye the jacket looks more like the mottled rabbit fur photo below than the dalmatian rabbit (notice how the mottling creates some areas that look gray in the transition spaces between the black and white), although I remember her jacket having more white all over than this mottled swatch shows, but memory can be a funny (and incorrect) thing at times.

Anyway, I had several skeins of the Red Heart Zebra colorway yarn on hand, and looking at the colors reminded me of Elaina’s rabbit fur jacket - which, by the way, she never let any of us other girls in class try on (LOL) - so I decided to try to make a vest for myself using this yarn - and then I could pretend I was wearing Elaina’s sumptuous jacket any time I wanted to! :-)

This is a variegated yarn with moderately short color changes. (White about 13-15 inches, gray about 10-12 inches, black about 30 inches.) Personally I think variegated yarns with short color changes look better when worked in crochet vs. knitting.

I started this project back in July 2019 working it as an improvised top-down raglan vest in a granny stitch and got most of the way done with it but then decided I didn’t like the way the vest looked on me. Ultimately I decided to rip it out and start over using the On Point Poncho (paid) pattern as the shape inspiration for a long, fringed barn jacket. Fingers crossed that I like the way it turns out this time …

OK, I’ve reworked the jacket to the point where I can safely say that I do like it much better now by doing the On Point Poncho pattern as a cardigan. The body and fringe (two 14-inch strands folded together and placed in every-other stitch across the bottom hem, resulting in 7-inch fringe) are complete, and now I just have to decide how long to make the sleeves. I think I’ll finish them at 3/4 length (19 rows plus 1 row of SC edging) with minimal tapering (to 60 stitches around).

Total yarn weight: 945 grams or about 4.77 skeins / 976.0 yards.