Sweater that no one has seen before / Sweaters in literature

I came across this true story described in the diary of this Czech writer and translator Jan Zábrana sometimes in the 1970s, but the story dates back to 1953. Just a little preview, his parents were condemned for a parricide in a fabricated trial in the 50s and both of them spent in a prison 10 years. Zábrana was only 20 then and took this act as a personal violation which he suffered all his remaining life. His diary is at places sour, depressive, especially after he turned 40 (quite early to feel the death coming, eh?), it is as well a diary of the every day life in a socialistic country, at places it is energetic and pleasure to read, gives opinion on literature, writers, poets, memories at contemporaries and his own little stories he went through and he considered funny or worth memorizing for other reasons.
So one day in spring 1953 he received a package with a sweater. It was sent from a prison where his father sat, it was supposed to be a piece of clothes that his father didn't need but as it turned out it all must have been a mistake, his dad never possessed a sweater like that. Anyway, Zábrana kept it and describes it: (here I apologize for my translation and thus injury to the original beautiful text). "It was a fantastic beauty - I have never seen anything like that before or after. It was gigantic, reached to my knees. It could have been 20 years old or even more. It had a strange pink-cyclamen basic color, but patterned with green, brown, umber squares and rectangles, a pattern that I have never seen in Bohemia before - someone must have brought it to Czechoslovakia from Jamaica in the 30s. But all the colors were so washed out that a sweater looked like a hummingbird leached from an acid. It had a gigantic collar with exotic buttons, each different. And it was repaired in a similar fantastic way: the holes in sleeves were knitted in with thread of different colors, with cloth patches, with patches from old socks from a rough gray yarn, armpits were fixed up with some felt, perhaps cut up an army blanket or a horse cloth. All these patches, although unplanned and rampaged, were sewn exceptionally carefully and thoroughly - it looked like a garment of a clownish Methuselah or a Norwegian sea wolf. I used to wear that sweater at night shifts, also when going out to pubs at the peripheries of Prague, at a place like that they threw me out once when I had it on, they thought I ran away from a mad house. At the close of one muggy day in June, when I arrived two ours late to my friend's house, Alice gave me a hug even in that sweater and started to kiss me hysterically and cry that she had been worried about me. She was wearing a yellow bikini. We were standing at the door sill, she in that yellow swimsuit and I in that unbelievable sweater of the faded rainbow colors and she was hugging me and cried with joy that I had showed up after all, that I didn't get picked up." (understand: not because of the sweater but because it was a Stalinistic era.)

Do they wear sweaters in Jamaica? Just imagine that only 30 years and something ago there could have been sweaters that were hard to imagine, that "one hadn't seen before". So, of course, I went and googled up Jamaica + sweater. And there are all these sweaters made of a yarn called Jamaica, what a disappointment, but nothing nothing that I was looking for. So, despite Google, this description by Zábrana still remains a mystery. After all, the sweater probably wasn't from Jamaica. Any suggestions?


Edited: Here is a version of the sweater that Robotika drew after she had read this post: http://robotika.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/the-lost-sweater/