Two First Prizes at the Ekka

This year I entered two very different pieces in the Royal Queensland Show — a crocheted baby blanket and a bobbin lace bookmark — and I'm thrilled to share that both came home with First Prize. The bookmark went one step further, taking out Best Exhibit in the Lace Making category.

I'll be sharing the full story behind each piece over the next couple of posts, but here's the short version: neither of these was made for the show. They're both just what leaves my hook and my pillow on an ordinary week — the same tension, the same attention to finish, the same standard every piece from Legacy Laceworks is held to. Having that measured against other makers, and coming out on top, means a great deal.

The bookmark's story is one I'm especially looking forward to sharing. It wasn't even the piece I'd planned to enter — and yet it came out on top of the entire Lace Making category.

Next up: the making of the baby blanket, and the almost-accidental way the bookmark came to be entered at all. Stay tuned.

If you've never seen bobbin lace being worked, it looks a little like organised chaos — dozens of thread pairs hanging from a pillow, each one wound around its own small bobbin, all of it held in place by a forest of pins.

This is the Kathleen 2 Bookmark, partway through. The pattern underneath — the dots, crosses, and diagonal lines you can just make out on the card — is the working diagram, and every pin marks a point the threads need to pass through, in a very particular order. Thirty-eight pairs of thread are in play here, each one doing its own small job, crossing and twisting with its neighbours to slowly build the pattern from the top down.

There's no shortcut through this. Each pin has to go in by hand, each pair of bobbins has to be moved in sequence, and if you lose your place, there's not much to do except unpick it and start the section again. It's slow, methodical work — closer to following a musical score than to typical crochet or knitting, where you can often feel your way through a repeat.

A single bookmark like this one takes somewhere between 11 and 12 hours from first pin to last. That's not wasted time — it's where the fineness of the lace comes from, and why a finished piece has a density and structure you don't get from faster techniques.

It's also, if I'm honest, one of my favourite parts of the whole process. There's something genuinely calming about a craft that only moves forward one careful step at a time.

More progress shots to come as this one gets closer to finished — and if you've got questions about how bobbin lace works, I'd love to hear them.

Some of the best pieces start long before the first stitch — sometimes months before. Right now, I'm in that in-between stage: nine skeins of indie-dyed merino are on their way to me, and until they arrive, all I have to work with is colour, memory, and imagination.

This is the reality of working with small, independent dyers rather than commercial yarn lines. You don't get instant gratification. You get something considered — dyed by hand, in small batches, with variation from skein to skein that no mill line will ever quite replicate. It's part of why I love working this way, even though it means a bit of patience along the road.

I've chosen two colour stories for this batch. One leans soft and dusty — purples and neutrals that I can already picture folding into a quiet, understated shawl, the kind of piece that disappears into an outfit rather than shouting over it. The other is bolder: blues and greens pulled together the way a Scottish landscape shifts from loch to hillside to sky, all held in the one palette. A few extra skeins are coming along too, chosen on instinct rather than a firm plan — sometimes the best colour decisions only make sense once the yarn is actually in my hands, in the light, against the other pieces I'm working on.

While I wait, here's a look at the pattern I'll be working from, alongside a previously finished piece that hints at the kind of colour movement I'm picturing for the blue-green palette — the sense of texture and drape these skeins will eventually take on. It's a slower kind of creativity, but it means that by the time the yarn lands, I already know exactly what I want it to become.

I'll share progress as these shawls take shape. If you've got a colour combination you love and want to see turned into a shawl one day, I'd love to hear it.