Awful pun by kind permission of Mr Figworthy. Yes, Bartram is back – in fact two Bartrams are back! Because last Friday my sheep-mad friend came over for a stitching session and made a start on hers. I’d had a brief go at mine earlier in the week at my Embroidery Group, and managed his legs (minus blue split stitch outline) and the start of his purple backside (because I’d forgotten that the red wool for his chest, which I had meant to start with, was still in my Hengest box).

At first I wasn’t going to add the green hillocks, as they are not in the transfer pattern; they are, however, in Tanya Bentham’s stitched model and I rather liked the look of them. On the grounds that even the Bayeux Tapestry has some stem stitch in it, we decided to work them in that, in two blended greens. Then Trina said that the position of his head suggested he was about to eat something, so we added some blades of grass in straight stitch for him to munch.

By the way, in the original version the fleece stripes (seven instead of six) are very distinct – one ends, the other begins. I decided to use a bit of shading, not so much to blend everything together (the colours are too different for that) but just as an interesting transition. I like the effect!

Now I can’t get it to show up clearly in the photographs, but in real life that purple is very dark. Too dark. I contemplated taking it out, but decided to wait until the red was in to see whether it really needed changing; it was going to be a fiddly job, so I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have to. But alas, it was necessary. With all the other fleece colours, where they shade into each other the transitional stripes are quite noticeable, whereas between the purple and the blue it was almost invisible. Normally an invisible transition is exactly what you want, but in this case I wanted the stripes! It was time for a bottomectomy.

The cutting looks a bit brutal, but it was the easiest way of getting the purple out, and it meant I couldn’t shilly-shally and change my mind half way through. I had to be careful though, because if at all possible I wanted to leave the blue in place and stitch the new purple in between. Fortunately that worked, and the lighter purple shows up the transition with the blue much better as I hoped it would, so I’m pleased I took the plunge and changed it.

Only now the red looks too dark…