Almost a year's work

It was last December I started planning a special 40th birthday gift for my Soul Twin who lives in the U.K.

We were going to be on the road for about 6 weeks, and as a passenger I would be able to take something small to work on.

Having decided applique would be too much to organise before we left, and stitchery wouldn't be special enough, I took a few 1970s vintage patterns and some crochet cotton along for the ride.

The first piece I started ended up being too difficult to follow as a pattern, and I would have to do hours and hours of crochet before finding that I might have made an error.

Next!!!

I really needed to have the gift posted yesterday, but as you can see I am still working on it.

In the last few days I made 50 of these little flowers in white, to contrast with the main part, and started to attach them to the d'oiley.

I found these lovely, lovely needles at my local quilt shop.

The packaging is lovely - it looks like fimo flowers, and it's useful. The needles cannot be accessed from the jar by my 15 month old toddler who is FINDing everything!

These particular ones are for hand quilting with perle thread, so the eye of the needle was perfect for hand stitching the little flowers onto the d'oiley and weaving in the thread ends (ohhh! the ends! Will they end?)

Best get back to the actual stitching, the d'oiley needs to head off on Monday.