Octagon Magic

[Capn]

Andre Norton wrote Octagon Magic way back in the late 1960s, but it's still a good read, especially for a girl who has recently moved to a new place far from home.

A pair of stork-shaped embroidery scissors and some pretty embroidery floss from DMC or a similar company (any colours you like) would be an excellent small but very thoughtful gift here. If you can find them, one or two gold embroidery needles would be especially cool, and if you could find a vintage wooden needlecase, you would really have something.

The stork scissors and the floss (and a needle, if she might not have one already) would be sufficient, though. :)

[Capn]

So there are two other vintage middle grade reads that involve embroidery (samplers, in both cases):

A Stitch in Time
&
Thimbles

Both are time-slip. Both feature the old-fashioned embroidered samplers of past children. Thimbles has the obvious gift of a thimble (gold-coloured, old and batttered, plain silver - all are involved).

Would be a super neat gift, to give the materials to make a sampler of their own, plus these three stories... :)

[Capn]

And it turns out there are how-to books available, too:

Creative Sampler Embroidery
An Embroidery Sampler
Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850
Simply Samplers: Hand Embroidery Through a Variety of Easy Techniques
etc. ;)