A wonderful pattern, written to be a tutorial! And when we saw that one of the original shawls was knit with the marvelous Breathless yarn from Shalimar, well, I just had to contact the designer.
Design by Dee offers this pattern as a free one on Ravelry and there you can download it to your heart's content.
Here is what Dee writes:
"Ashton is a lovely shawlette that is offered as a comprehensive 10-page, charted pattern/tutorial that was designed specifically for knitters who wish to venture into using charts or knitting lace for the first time.
"The large, easy-to-view charts are formatted to be user-friendly and simple to comprehend. The pattern includes a 4-page tutorial with step-by-step instructions on how to read the charts as well as detailed notes on how to increase the size of the shawl and how to block it.
"The tutorial will help you understand how to use the Ashton charts specifically and in turn how to understand most charted lace patterns. My hope is that you learn to appreciate lace charts as the wonderful tool that they are so you can discover and knit any of the many lace patterns out there that use charts exclusively. You may even find the charts easier to use than written instructions once you master them!
"If you already read charts and are just looking for a versatile and fun shawlette to knit, the pattern is complete and stands on its own without the tutorial pages.
"This top-down, triangular shawlette knits up quickly in fingering weight yarn, but may be knitted in lace weight, sport weight or whatever weight you like. The shawlette versions pictured used an average of 400-420 yards of fingering weight yarn.
"Ashton is the perfect shawlette to showcase your favorite variegated hand-dyed or tonal yarns and can be knitted using only one skein of most sock yarns. The ability to increase the shawl size simply by adding repeats of the leaf bud motif section makes Ashton easily customizable for whatever yarn or needle size you choose...
"I hope you all enjoy knitting little Ashton!!"
What we are offering on this page is a gift from us of the pattern printed out (with Dee's permission) plus one skein of Breathless to make this beauty with.
Breathless is a fingering weight mix of 75% Superwash Merino/15% Cashmere/ 10% Silk. Needless to say, it feels amazing. Each four ounce skein has a nice 420 yards to it.
The colorway we have here is not pictured except in the inset photo on the top photo and again below it though it has a lot of similarity to the gold one used. It is a lovely warm hue called Melba, a tone-on-tone play of golds and orange -- a true sunset colorway that is simply glorious!
Makes me smile!
