West 67th. A street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Not our usual Brit-inspired pun. But this is where Belinda has found herself living for a few months, and this is our Rhinebeck sweater as it’s what she wore to visit the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in 2013.

The vertical pattern is not exactly cables and not exactly lace but perhaps best described as combination of the two, yarn overs, slipped sts, pss-overs end up looking like little snakey cables.

As we all know, alpaca has a reputation for ‘growing’, even at 30% content and the chainette construction of the yarn will do nothing to stop this, although the wool content means it won’t turn into an entirely different jumper. Bearing this in mind, West 67th is meant to be worn with a fair (not enormous) amount of positive ease (around 15-20cm / 6-8”, which might not be as oversized as you imagine) and be a relaxed, weekend-y-sloppy-joe-y sort of sweater, the sort you lounge around in or throw on over another layer or so instead of a coat to walk the dog in, so it doesn’t matter if it relaxes a bit between washes (who doesn’t?). Take your actual bust measurement and then add on 15 - 20cm / 6 - 8” to see which size to knit.

West 67th is knitted in Cascade Eco Cloud, a 70% merino wool / 30% alpaca chainette-constructed yarn. It is delicious stuff, and produces a warm, spongy, soft and drapey fabric. You can either get the undyed Eco-cloud in 9 natural alpaca colours blended with merino or the dyed version, Cloud, which comes in a sizeable range of 34 colours.

6(7, 7, 7, 8) x 100g hanks.

Shown in: Shade 1809, Dove Gray

Tension: 15.5 sts and 22 rows to 10cm / 4” over pattern on 6mm nds AFTER wet blocking. The Eco Cloud changed quite a lot, we found, after a gentle swoosh in soapy water.

There’s a full schematic in the pattern to help you understand how big your sweater will be and the pattern is written giving row counts for length to prevent any trauma between pre- and post-blocking length. If your row count is off from our tension you can easily work our how many rows you do need to knit given some basic maths. We can probably even rustle up a tutorial on how exactly to that… (just in case you’re worried).