Growing

I basically spent the entire day yesterday with the Armenian knotted lace doily. Rounds and rounds
and like most doilies the further you get, the slower your progress. This picture was just two rounds before I called it a day on it. This is also the point where the book's description of the pattern fell apart. At this point I had to start relying on my ability to count stitches on grainy old photographs and make educated guesses. Except here it's counting knots and loops instead of double stitches and picots.

I did start the next section and so far it seems to be working out correctly. The round after this involved long loops, skipping over some of the small ones and I think I managed to count accurately. Of course this is still relatively the beginning of the rather large doily. I'm hoping that I get so much practice during this project that when I'm done I can tackle those knotted lace flowers that this technique is so striking in. Of course I'm also thinking of all the other things I can do with this technique including meshing it with the other ones I know. Maybe when I'm done learning all these classic lace techniques I'll get really creative and something really unique will get made, or not...it's too early to tell.