A blue cat sitting in profile, eyes closed and clearly content, its tail curled round in front like a whirl. There is not a single stitch of outline: the eye, the whiskers and the turns of the tail are unstitched fabric, gaps left on purpose inside the blue. Around it, a heart built from cat paw prints and loose hearts in pink, orange, amber, olive green, violet and blue, with small sparks filling the spaces between.

It is 122 x 162 stitches, about 22 by 29 centimetres on 14-count, and only a third of the cells carry a stitch: the rest is fabric doing the work of a background. There are six threads, but nearly half the stitches are the cat's blue, DMC 3845; the others share out the wreath in small patches. That is exactly what makes it easy: whole crosses throughout, no halves and no backstitch, barely twenty isolated stitches in the whole thing, and each paw print is a compact block of one colour you can finish in a sitting. And since the wreath colours never touch one another, you can change them all without touching the cat: in shades of a single colour it turns sober, and with all six it stays as you see it.