Thread by @rclarkie

A wee thread, Part II - The boy, the bowl & the tweet that jumped the fence - update. Feel free to RT.

So, as some of you might know, my youngest, Gabriel (12) loves his woodwork. A lot. (1)

Back round Easter I put out a tweet to see if I could encourage a few more followers on his instagram page (clarkie_woodwork) and the whole thing blew up!! 💥💥💥 Over a weekend he went from 6 to 220,000 followers, all thanks to you crazy lovely people. (2)

He had orders for over 20,000 bowls, which he calculated would take over 30yrs to make, so instead he decided to carve just one bowl, his #bowlforUkraine to try and raise £5k for #SavetheChildren. (3)

The press went nuts and the story travelled the world. He spent his Easter Hols doing TV, Radio and newspaper interviews and was featured on the BBC, ITV, Korean TV, USA Today and even The Drew Barrymore Show!! (4)

In two weeks, largely thanks to your incredible generosity (and some famous faces RT-ing), he/you managed to raise over £250,000! 💥🤩🔥 (5)

And Gabriel's #bowlforukraine was won by Renuka Champman from London. (6)

A crazy heartwarming tale I'm sure you'll all agree.
But it didn't quite end there... (7)

Just a week later his Instagram account was hacked. For 24hrs his followers were subjected to dull photos of someone's bizarre eating habits. 🙄🥱 (8)

That's before the wonderful people at #savethechildren stepped in and used their contacts to get the account restored - minus the 20,000 followers who had decided in the meantime that photos of someone's poor diet wasn't for them! (9)

But, as you may remember, Gabriel's original purpose was to sell his bowls to save up for a cool mountain bike. And many felt he really deserved it after all his fundraising efforts. And Mum and Dad agreed. (10)

And so did the amazing @neildonoghue13 at @gmbntweet who reached out and, with the help of @Nuke_Proof, granted Gabriel's wish! ⬇️⬇️⬇️(11)

So he got the mountain bike of his dreams!!
🚵‍♀️🚵‍♀️🚵‍♀️(12)

Oh, but that's not all... (13)

A couple of weeks ago he was invited to Kensington Palace, as part of the HRM The Queen's Silver Jubilee, to be formally congratulated by Princess Anne!! 👑👋(14)

And of course, as you'd probably expect, he made her a bowl too. (15)

Sorry - thread broke!! Again, thank you, you kind-hearted, crazy twitter people. 🙏 You've make a big difference to a lot of lives. x

Feel free to continue to follow Gabriel's adventures over on instagram at clarkie_woodwork.