This book appealed to me in some ways right from the start. Sally Tuttle is the main heroine, who works in a sewing and mending shop. She also does serious embroidery in her spare time, and has won a competition. She is in her forties, so she was a teenage schoolgirl in the 1970s; there's a great deal of reminiscing about those days, with little snippets of observation that could have come straight from my own school-days: double needlework; rough books; bizarre conversations about chemistry during unrelated lessons; giggling about words like 'bust-line' on sewing patterns...