I remember hearing once that the best-selling items at Mr Price are those t-shirts that say things like ‘No Money No Honey’ and ‘Normal People Scare Me’. This is just one of those facts I carry in my head that I have never fact-checked and I don’t plan on doing so now. Anyway, how annoying is it when you find a nice top in a beautiful shade with a good cut and also for some reason the phrase ‘Cool To Be Kind’ embroidered on the front.

Now I’m not saying it’s uncool to be kind; I would never be so judgemental. But I am saying to put that on a shirt is embarrassing. To wear it, unforgivable.

I recently found such a nice big sweatshirt in the perfect shade of green but, of course, it paid homage to some mythical Italian resort called Villa Paradiso (Est. 1991) on the front. Luckily it was just screen printed on, and could easily be covered with five days’ worth of embroidering.

The colour made me think of this painting of two frogs holding hands while crossing a meadow by Dayris Felix.

My girlfriend and I made it into a sticker on WhatsApp and send it to each other to convey the message ‘this is us’ or ‘wish we were here’.

Usually, I use dressmaker’s carbon to trace designs before embroidering. It’s like regular carbon paper we’d use to track sales of our various pipe cleaner crafts at market day in junior school, except it washes out of fabric. I didn’t have any though, so rather drew the outlines of them on paper, cut around them, and then traced around that shape onto the sweatshirt. A tedious process.

I had to add some artfully placed flowers and grass to fully cover up the ‘Positano, Italy’ bit but I think this added some balance and interest.

Now all that’s left is to be extremely careful with it and never eat anything involving sauce again so we never need to wash it ‘cos it’s too stressful to put hours of work into the washing machine but also hand washing is so tedious.