Hands up if you love a Jack Russell terrier! Yes, we do too – and we are just as besotted with our new tapestry kit, The Tennis Ball Thief. In our tapestry we’ve tried to capture both the traditional feel and the sense of mischief of William Morris’s famous Strawberry Thief design.
In our version, the Jack Russells are shunning the delicious strawberries in favour of the irresistible tennis balls. Anyone who has had a Jack Russell will know how hard it can be to get their dog to part with a ball once he or she has taken possession of it!
This Tennis Ball Thief has taken a mere four years to complete. Two years ago we were ready to stitch an earlier version of the design but something wasn’t quite right so we held back, pondered for a while and tried to figure out what the problem was. Then it struck us – we’d worked the initial design as a square but the Strawberry Thief needed to be rectangular.
So it was back to the graph paper and time to start all over again. We were almost ready with the second version when Covid struck and that was the end of our design time for over a year!
Finally it was football rather than tennis that enabled The Tennis Ball Thief to finally be completed. Mr Jolly Red is a keen football fan and I am not. His love of the game works brilliantly for me because while he watched a zillion European Cup matches earlier this year, I made it my mission to use this valuable time to finally finish The Tennis Ball Thief.
The initial response to this design has been amazing and we do hope that you like it too.
Happy stitching – and keep an eye on those little Jacks, You never know what they’re getting up to!
Kelly x
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