When a shop has a really good sale on and you were going to place an order with them anyway, what do you do? Buy what you were going to buy and spend less, or spend what you were going to spend and buy more?

This is not an idle question. Today and tomorrow The Silk Mill offers 25% off everything. I’d decided last week that I would treat myself to 50 of their silks, and fortunately *phew* didn’t actually place the order because I ran out of time. As they have 700 shades to choose from, it’s been taking me some time to put together a sensible selection of useful colours in four or five shades each. And then there was “Whiter Shade of Pale”.

“Whiter Shade of Pale” is one of their themed sets and consists of 14 shades of not-quite-white – the very palest shades of pink, grey, green, flesh, so pale that they are, you might say, coloured whites. It’s a beautiful set, I’ve fallen in love with it, and I don’t need it.

Or do I?

Ethelnute has left me with a taste for Opus Anglicanum, and I’ve been looking for another project. At the Coombe Abbey retreat Angela Bishop had with her a small split stitch embroidery of a horse based on a medieval cope. It was a horse that made you giggle. It had character. I looked up the Steeple Aston cope online and found it had a companion horse, equally eccentric. I drew outlines of both, put in some colour suggestions, altered the reins and bridles and tucked them away in a folder somewhere.

Then I saw the not-quite-whites and thought Unicorn. Not sure why, but I did. And I wondered whether one of the horses, probably the one Angela used as well, could become a medieval unicorn (which means that besides a horn he’d also have a goatee; or should that be a unicornee?). For now, he is just an ordinary polka-dotted horse with mad eyes – but he could be transformed!

He’ll probably have to lose his bridle and jewels (unless I make him a tamed unicorn), and of course a horn will be added (not too long; I want to keep the design squarish) as well as the chin hair – but I can just see him split stitched in grey with all his polka dots worked in some of those lovely coloured whites.

So will I buy the set? I’ll let you know…