It is still winter: the Winter Olympics have started, and perhaps where you are, there is snow. Well, maybe not in Australia.

This kit is inspired in part by The Skating Minister, a painting by Henry Raeburn of the Reverend Robert Walker skating alone on Duddingston Loch, one arm folded across his chest. I loved the idea of a solitary lady skating on the little river that flows through an imagined village, past the church and the lodge, with its grand gates. The latter were copied from a photograph of some magnificent gates we spotted in the dusty yard of a brocante in France.

The stitches are not complicated, and you can download my Favourite Stitches free of charge from my website: just click on the appropriate sliding image on the home page.

The image is just bigger than A5 portrait, and the kit contains carefully produced, clear and comprehensive instructions as well as all the threads you will need.

The price for this kit, which is larger and uses more thread, includes postage and packing to all areas of the countries listed above. As a rule, over the past year post has been much slower: Australia in particular can take up to a month. Canada is fastest and safest, and the USA varies between two weeks and a month. We rarely lose orders, which is why we do not insist on tracking, which makes the postage 25% of the cost of the kit.

Please note that we do not track orders, but tracking can be purchased separately. However, orders worth over £100 for kits (not including other products) will be sent by International Tracked free of extra charge.

ALL ORDERS TO THE EU ARE TRACKED AUTOMATICALLY until things settle down post Brexit!

We try to post orders either on the same day or next working day at the latest, depending on when the order comes in.