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Of this design Jools says: "

Albert & Effie are the central characters of this sampler and they live in a parallel world to our own. In this strange place lies the Garden of Need (an acronym for “Never Ending Embroidered Desires” and also an anagram of Eden curiously enough), and right at its very heart stands The Tree of Paradox.

Nestled in the branches of the gnarled old hardwood live a pair of twin snakes who represent duality; the two sides of a story; light and dark; good and evil and all that sort of stuff. But on their days off they represent their country at darts. Funny old world isn’t it?

In this other dimension the couple taste both of the apples offered to them by the serpents and then make up their own minds how to live their lives, standing or falling purely and simply by their own decisions.

Albert & Effie aren’t the only people who live there and, for some unknown reason, all the inhabitants bear a striking resemblance to characters from classical ballet. Al & Eff are the spitting image of Adam and Eve in Andrei Petrov’s ballet Creation of the World for starters. The prima ballerina waving her flower about is a lookalike of Dame Alicia Markova playing the Sugar Plum Fairy in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. The couple in the lozenge with the windmill and beehive could be carbon copies of Franz and Swanhilda in Delibes comic ballet Coppelia and those two young lassies at the very bottom left are dead ringers for the two village girls who prance about in Soleil de Nuit by Rimsky-Korsakov, or am I the only one who can see the likeness there?

So now, dear stitchers, you know virtually everything there is to know. All these delightful characters are sure to become your friends as your needle dances its way through this charted tour of the Garden of Need and, as my Granny Ada always told me, “A friend in Need is a friend indeed”. Enjoy your stitching, just don’t pet the camels – they’re inclined to spit!"

• Area in stitches: 265 x 312