My mother sent me the link to this shawl from Woman’s Day Magazine. Since she’s never asked me to make her anything before, I hopped right on it. The first challenge was finding the materials. No one sells J. & P. Coats LusterSheen locally, but I was finding something from Red Heart also called LusterSheen which surprisingly had the exact same color names. Since this seemed like a trademark violation I checked with r.c.t.y and got confirmation that they were the same thing (possibly Red Heart bought out J & P Coats?).

Having found the materials I needed, I started crocheting. The next trouble was that my gauge was off quite a bit. My squares were coming out rectangular. It didn’t matter if I went up or down a hook, I just ended up with larger or smaller rectangles. So I ended up modifying the pattern to use HDC instead of DC which made my squares square. I was afraid it might make the shawl too short, but it came out exactly the length Woman’s Day said it should. After all of the prep work, crocheting the shawl was a breeze.

Here’s a close up of the filet work. I’d never done filet crochet before but that turned out to be the easy part. I’ve done plenty of counted cross stitch and it’s pretty similar – just count the squares and fill in the ones that are filled in on the pattern. I think this photo is a more accurate representation of the color.