A sentimental handmade gift from one woman to her best friend has gone viral across the internet as strangers fell in love with their story.
Laney Boyd and her best friend Amber met when they were nine and 10 years old. Now, both aged 35, they have been through everything together, and are still each other’s person despite living a thousand miles apart.
“Even though we grew up about as close as two people possibly could, as adults we now live three states away from each other,” Boyd, who lives in Nebraska while Amber is in still in their home state of Nevada, told Newsweek. “Whenever I’m on the phone, my kids automatically call out ‘Hi Amber!’ because 90 percent of the time it’s her on the other end.”
But while they keep in constant touch, it can be difficult not to be there for each other in person when one of them is going through a tough time, as Boyd said Amber is now.
“I stitched this gift for her because I wanted her to have something tangible from me to remind her that I’ve been all in since day one. I’m not going anywhere.”
A talented embroiderist, Boyd got to work on a sentimental gift for Amber, depicting how their friendship started. When Boyd was nine, her family moved into a new home, which happened to be two doors down from where Amber lived.
As she explained in an Instagram post on her page @thistles.and.thread, Amber “marched straight over upon learning of my existence and declared to my dad, ‘I hear you’ve got a daughter.'”
Boyd was “promptly steered two houses down by this whirlwind of a girl, and we spent the rest of the day making beaded bracelets while listening to a b*witched CD on her giant boombox. Thus—in the most aggressively millennial kid fashion possible—was our friendship born.”
The elegant stitching shows the outline of three houses: two on each side stitched in black, representing Boyd and Amber’s homes, and the middle stitched in white. Words underneath the simple illustration read: “I hear you’ve got a daughter.”
Boyd shared the fruits of her labor to Reddit’s r/Embroidery via her account u/colormuse on December 1, and wrote: “Made for my best friend—these were the first words she spoke to my dad when we moved into the house two doors down from hers 25 years ago.”
Boyd’s embroidery had a major response on multiple platforms, including on her Instagram page @thistles.and.thread, Facebook, and Reddit, where it racked up a whopping 64,000 upvotes.
Boyd believes it’s been seen by more than 4 million people, and said she has been “completely blown away by the response,” and that Amber herself can “definitely feel the love” from the countless online strangers.
“Hundreds of complete strangers took the time to express how lucky we are to have each other, share their own friendship origin stories, and to hope that we remain best friends for 25 more years. The kindness was overwhelming!”
On Reddit, one impressed commenter wrote: “Omg that’s so cute, the story and the gift.”
“This is so romantic in a platonic way,” another said. “I LOVE it.”
Another predicted: “Oh you’re gonna make her cry for sure, and then you’re gonna cry too. I just know it”—to which another admitted: “I’m crying and I don’t even know these people.”
And that person was correct, as Boyd revealed: “The day I posted the piece I texted her and said ‘Check Instagram when you can; there’s a surprise there for you.’
“A little while later she called me on her drive into work, and I believe her exact words were ‘You turned me into a puddle!’—and then she lovingly chastised me for making her cry and having to redo her makeup before work.”
As for what she believes has caused her embroidery to resonate with so many people, she suggested it’s all about the “human connection aspect behind the work.”
“There’s such widespread isolation and division right now, so it feels as though people are craving stories of enduring relationships—I know I am.
“And of the stories we do see, a lot of them are focused on romantic relationships, which are wonderful, but I think tales of lifelong friendship are a bit less common.”
As she put it: “Amber and I are so much a part of each other’s daily lives that I think we don’t often stop to think about how rare it is to still be so close after 25 years.”
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