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.

FOR EXTRA ROWS OF LEAVES ON THE BORDER: The pattern as written has two rows of leaves on the border. You may notice that some Ashton projects have additional rows of leaves such as this beauty. (Check out those beads too!) If you would like to knit your Ashton with that variation, just repeat Rows 15 to 24 of Border Chart 3 for each additional row of leaves. Feel free to PM me for more details if you like.

PLEASE NOTE: In order to achieve the nice deep scallops and crisp points pictured on the shawls to the left, natural fibers are highly recommended. The blocking instructions included in the pattern are specifically written for shawls knitted with natural fibers. (If you are knitting with a 100% acrylic yarn or one with a high acrylic content, you may wish to google “blocking acrylic” or “killing acrylic” in order to find out how to achieve the best results.)

I hope you all enjoy knitting little Ashton!!

Please set the “Page Scaling” on your Adobe Acrobat printing window (left side) to NONE in order for the charts to print as large as possible.