I shared in a previous post that I’ve been working away on the Ashton Shawlette, a free pattern by designer Dee O’Keefe, which I found thanks to Ravelry.

I’m actually doing it twice over.  Since I haven’t had a whole lot of luck knitting lace shawls, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t come to grief again while using some special yarn.  So I dug around in my stash and pulled out some old vintage acrylic called Red Heart Luster Sheen.  This particular stuff is so vintage… Well, let me show you what I mean.

So it’s taken me a total of three months to finish — some of that time the project was in what some knitters call “time out,” like a naughty child.  And I really would have completed the project last week… except I ran into a knot in the yarn more than halfway through my bind-off.  Knitters will understand my pain.

Still, I stubbornly stuck with the notion this trial run should be as perfect as possible, so I undid my bind-off and re-knit, minus the knot.

My little shawlette has gone from this:

To this — finished, but not quite finished:

And finally today, after some serious pinning and very careful use of my iron (while protecting the knit fabric with a cotton cloth) this is my finished product:

And now, on to the Real Thing!