Einstein as a caricature: an enormous head on a small body, the white hair flying off in every direction, the great moustache, the lined forehead and that look of being about to tell you something. He wears a dark blue jacket, a buttoned orange waistcoat and a brown bow tie, one hand in his pocket and in the other a wooden-framed slate with the formula chalked on it: E=MC². There is no background — the figure is cut out against the fabric.

It is 95 x 183 stitches, about 17 by 33 centimetres on 14-count, two thirds of the cells worked and the rest left bare. What sets it apart from the rest of the Collection is the threads: seventeen of them, and not one takes charge — the most used accounts for under twelve per cent of the total — so you change colour often here, and it pays to work in zones: the jacket first, then the waistcoat, then the face. Leave the hair for last, because that is where the white and the grey-blues cross over and where nearly all of the pattern's 1,148 isolated stitches gather. Whole crosses throughout, no halves and no backstitch.