This post is well overdue. I’ve been so busy working on projects that I haven’t set any time aside to write and several of my 2024 plans have already come to pass.

I’m slowly whittling down my WIP list and my top priority for the past few months has been my Aintab embroidery piece. I’m nearly finished now and I’m planning to write a much longer post about it when it’s complete. I designed the embroidery and lace entirely myself and I’m quite pleased with how it’s turning out. I used a piece 40 count linen and had to buy a magnifier so I could see the threads properly.

This picture is from a few weeks ago, when I was still hemming and hadn’t started the lace yet. I’ve made significant progress since then and have newer pictures, but I like the pretentious architectural angle here. It’s jaunty.

I had some work travel earlier this year and made a doily to pass the time during the trip. I can’t do counted embroidery on planes anymore so the doily was a perfect travel project, especially since one of my flights was significantly delayed. This doily wasn’t on the WIP list but it was a quick finish so I’m counting that as successful.

If you look closely (or from far away) you can see where I made math mistakes. I am choosing to blame this on altitude sickness despite the fact that the part of Colorado I was in is actually lower in altitude than most of the Western half of I-40. The middle bands don’t line up, but the scalloped border looks beautiful and that’s the important part.

I’m officially signed up for the Thistle Threads 17th Century Whitework course and I’m very excited. It starts in June, which means I only have a few weeks left to make real progress on my current projects. The class is 18 months long and I want to be able to focus on it so I can complete the projects on time. This means I need to finish my state fair preparations by June 1st, which shouldn’t be too difficult. I think I can finish the lace border on the Aintab piece in a week which just leaves adding embroidery to the drawn thread border. Originally I had planned to do something “unnecessarily complex” as a certain art historian might say, but for the sake of time (and my sanity) I’m now leaning towards an elegant but simple pattern. The addition of my work travel doily means I now have two needle lace doilies that need to be mounted. This isn’t my favorite thing to do, but I have a method now and can probably do each of them in an evening.

My big event this spring was teaching two Armenian lace workshops and I’m happy to say that they were both successful. The first was for my local UU group and they were wonderful students, especially considering none of them had done lacemaking before. A few weeks later I repeated the workshop for CRLG members at the spring Lace Day. I made my own materials for these workshops, including hand illustrations for left-handed and right-handed lacemakers. I’m planning to expand the workshop materials into a full Armenian needlelace guide which I should be able to work on simultaneously with the whitework class.

The WIP list is still long and includes a knitting project I haven’t touched in well over a year. I suppose I’m still young, but I sense that I need to be more thoughtful about starting projects if I want to have time to finish all of them.