Back and Jumping Right Into Spring!

Hi Everyone!  It feels really good to be back home!  I am not tired at all and could even keep a pretty high tempo at work today - I figured that I'd better use this energy to my advantage and get a post out of it!  ;-)

First off, big thanks to all of you for the kind words about my parents' home.  They certainly appreciate all the sweet comments too.
The seriousness and sadness of this trip was embedded in fun and relaxation too.  My Littelest Sister, from now on also known as Herr Slusk (which is truly exceptionally hilarious, but you may have to be Swedish and grown up in a home with ample access to child literature to understand why...), moved back to my parents' while I was in Sweden.  We even shared the gigantic pull out couch.  No pictures from that room... it looked like a closet explosion!  As I already reported a while back, we did have time to schedule a craft session, but she is much more determined than your average duck and managed to get an additional number of things started and completed.  She made 4 fabric rose brooches and almost finished a mountain climber pouch to keep chalk in during the four evenings we spent together. This is her craft tote BTW.  I am thrilled that she uses it, since I made it for her I few years back (I love, love, love Charley Harper!!!).

We did also keep Little Sister company most of the evenings.  She is at home with a wonderful, happy and very energetic 2 year old girl and a baby brother that was less that two weeks old when I arrived.  I tell you, the newborn babies sure spend a lot of time eating....  Anyway, the dad was studying for an exam and had to go to the library in the evenings, so the rest of us came over to play with the girl, keep sister company, bring food, and all that other good stuff.  I must say that it is pretty easy to be an aunt - you just figure out what the niece in question loves = dolls, and you bring her a package with a gigantic doll that you hand over as soon as you meet.  Bribing -> easy-peasy!  :-)  Anyway - she is simply super-charming and I will miss her a lot!

Other great memories;
The funeral, with a fantastic female priest, beautiful psalms and flower arrangements in the absolutely breathtaking Tibble Kyrka. 
This is the church from the outside - a boring and bleak box:

But this is the inside - fabulous, isn't it!?  I used to go to church here when I was a teenager....

 

 

 

Mom served both coffee and dinner after the service and it was wonderful.  Quite a few family members that we have not seen in years or, in some cases for "us kids", have never seen came to pay respects.  My God Mother came with most of her family and it was a lot of fun to reconnect with her.  She is both a seamstress and a stitcher and is, just like me, crazy about vintage Clara Waever/Eva Rosenstand cross-stitch patterns.  She also shared that she has been researching our family history and learned that our fascination with textile crafts lies in our DNA; we are decedents of silk traders.  How cool is that!?

I woke up at 5.30 AM on Sunday and it was already light outside.  I left the house for a walk in the forest around 8, while everyone was still in bed.  It was just wonderful to walk in the woods.  I listened to the silence, the bird song, the dripping of the melting snow.  I laughed as I almost landed on my back in a slick and icy area and I cried just 10 minutes later because it felt like I had come home, safe and welcomed back into open arms, right into nature.  I ran here every evening for years, to keep my feelings and thoughts down and the mounting stress at bay.  We swam in the little forest lake, dark, deep, quiet, mysterious.  I watched and learned to love the light; the long shadows in the early hours and the gold in the tree tops just before night begun.  We took cross-country ski trips in the winters and mom would bring hot chocolate and snacks as a bribe to get us to come.  I walked here with friends that I no longer know, back when I was a person I can't remember.  I look at the bird houses that someone has nailed to the tree trunks, far far up and I think to myself that good and caring people really do exist.  Tranquility.

Herr Slusk (bwahaha), mom, dad, and I going to City to shop for clothes and eat lunch at the Dance Museum in Stockholm.  All three were so sweet and helped me choose from all the cool clothes - it probably took about an hour to go through everything...   We got to walk through Old Town and enjoy the architecture and the beginning of spring.  (When DH saw my purchases, his comments were "That is colorful.  ....And artsy.".  That's what I get for trying to dress less in muted browns, blacks, and whites...  Here is a link to the Gudrun Sjoden web site "main entrance" if you would like to take a look at her style.  GS is a Swedish designer who is not afraid of colors in the least!)

Littelest Sister and I having a lot of pretty serious and deep discussions about life, work, family.  It was really great!  Here is a beautiful flowering spring basket that we passed by while out shopping & talking.  The basket belongs to the shop Oleana, which is a Norwegian sweater designer - check out the fantastic knitted beauties here: catalog (this pdfwill take a while to load, I am sure...  I was bad and bought the long shirt on the right side, page 2.  Yeah, I know.  It is colorful.  ...And artsy.).  The designer gets her inspiration from old wall paper, textiles and so on.  I can swear that one of the patterns she has was definitely inspired by Ruskin Lace! 

I got a fair amount of stitching complete on the way home.  Sitting 8 hrs on a plane works wonders for any stitching progress!  I am out of the dark gray floss, so I need to hit the store before long.  Other than that, it is pretty much done.

Another wonder was one of the feature movies on the flight back to the US, Black Swan! I won't bore you with my interpretations of this movie, which is a flick that is complicated and clever, deep with terrifying symbolism, scary, thrilling, exciting, and simply pure art.  Just go and watch it!  I saw "The King's Speech"  a couple of weeks ago.  Great movie, but I did not think about it a whole lot after it was over.  The Black Swan is a movie that I will carry with me for a long time.  I am even contemplating going to the movie theater to watch it all over again, just to get the full effect!  (I watched it twice on the flight... that is how great it was!)

Once I came back home, I noticed that Spring did not dip her toes in the lake this year, she found the highest trampoline and jumped off canon-ball style and splashed everything!  There are flowering trees, bushes and bulbs everywhere.  Before I even grabbed my purse from the car coming back from the airport, I got the camera out and took a few pics:

 

 

And finally, Herr Slusk (hihihi) showed me a couple of really awesome music videos that are a bit in the same line as Sledgehamer.
Here is "Mad World" by Gary Jules

and the really beautiful and impressive "Her Morning Elegance" by Oren Lavie 

Well, time to go and stitch or something... ;-)
Thanks so much for stopping by and talk with you in a bit!