A ‘couvige’ at GW textile museum

Good morning, DMV. It’s Tuesday, June 9.

Often, in my travels, in life, I like to wander wherever my feet will take me. I’ll pursue a thread to see where it leads, in hope of stumbling upon serendipity. And that is how I found the couvige. What’s that? I’ll explain, but first, follow as I trace my footsteps.

It started with Washingtonian’s guest list, which mentioned Chitra Sharma, the tinkerer-in-residence of the National Children’s Museum. I reached out to Chitra and set up a date to meet her at her home in Virginia.

Separately, Patti Konrad, a reader who had submitted photos to me, told me she lived at a retirement community in Virginia and invited me to lunch. I’ll be out that way, I thought; why not tack on an extra date?

After tea with Chitra, I met up with Patti, who showed me around Greenspring Village. We were looking at residents’ artwork on the walls around Greenspring when I was struck by this piece, inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s “House I” sculpture on the National Mall.

The above piece, the label said, is by a Greenspring resident named Karen Thompson. I searched her up, and lo and behold, she’s on Instagram. It turns out that she is a bobbin lacemaker and has volunteered as a curator of the lace collection at the Smithsonian American History Museum.

I clicked from her Instagram to the Chesapeake Region Lace Guild’s account, and that is how I found the couvige — a social gathering of bobbin lacemakers — Saturday at the George Washington University textile museum. My family and I went.

I sat next to the woman closest to the entrance. She told me her name was “Karn” (rhymes with “barn”). She demonstrated her bobbin lacemaking. Then I asked her if she knew Karen Thompson, and her eyes widened. “That’s me.” (She is originally from Denmark and pronounces her name unlike the traditional American way, so I didn’t make the connection.)

I told her and the other lacemakers of my roundabout journey through the hallways of a retirement community in Virginia to Karen’s Instagram and finally to this gathering at the museum.

Kristen Smith, 54, of Falls Church, Virginia, told me she used to watch bobbin lacemaking videos to relax at night and wondered, “What is this witchcraft?” She came to a couvige at GW textile museum in 2023 and sat at the “try-me pillow.”

“It really clicked. It scratched that itch in my brain,” said Kristen, who’s now the treasurer and membership chair of the Chesapeake Region Lace Guild.

She said the guild has 114 members — most, but not all, women. They have lace study groups across the region, including a Tuesday morning group Karen leads at Greenspring and one every second Thursday of the month (this Thursday) at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in D.C.

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Carol Sheldon Hylton, 81, of the Palisades neighborhood of D.C., took this photo of a magnolia blossom on the front side of her house as she and her dog Banana were returning from a morning walk on June 1. She had planted this tree for her mother years ago.

“I sent my dear friend Jennifer (who now lives in CA rather [than] in DMV) three pictures of magnolia blossoms on a tree planted for my Mother years ago … She enjoyed walking from our house to 'visit' that tree as it grew over the years,” Carol wrote me in an email.

“Jennifer texted me back that I should send you one of the photos of the magnolias I sent her earlier. It was a crisscrossing of the US in a loving way. So, I am sending it now. … Immense gratitude for gifts of nature — the scent you can imagine.”

Share your recent photos of life in the DMV here.

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