One more day til' vacation starts - woop, woop!

Happy Friday all!

This is a quick drive-by post - the parents are on their way in (less than 24 hrs - yay!) and I really should be cleaning my house instead of getting stuck in the net...
Anyway, I figure that I will be out of touch for the next 10 days while my parents are visiting, so here is a quick Hi and Hello!

Speaking about cleaning, instead of focusing on what I really need to get done, I had bunches of fun with the second Rosenstand bell-pull.  It is completed and I love them together - below a photo before it hit the ironing board.  The piece on the right was stitched back on 2010 - I have done worse than a 2 year gap between companion pieces in the past, I kid you not~!

Here below they are hanging in a door-way so that you can get a better feel for how tall they really are.  I am looking forward to hanging these babies in the house, but not so much to the hours of hem-stitching...

 Here are a few close-ups, just for fun.  The birds were a real joy to stitch!  They look so content and relaxed, don't you think?

I did also manage to start on the fourth segment of the EMS SAL 2012 sampler.  I haven't gotten very far yet, but I am taking my time with this section, since I am contemplating some possible changes.  It'll be interesting to figure things out, I am sure...

I am not sure about the small flower swag thingy at the bottom... they look a bit blah compared to the rest of the motifs.  DH comforted me by saying that it'll probably look better when all the other motifs are in place.  I am not positive that will help with making the relatively bland colors pop.  Oh well.  The berry branches are so sweet and I enjoy working on them.

After a longer dry-spell in the mail-box, I "accidentally" got in some stash this week.  First I got a package from Australia with a few stump-work kits from Jane Nicholas.  Stump-work is something I dream of making one day, but I don't think that day will be tomorrow...  LOL
Her designs are so, so, so pretty!  Well, since the parents are almost here, the bunnies had to move from the guest bed-room to the stitch room, so I can't dig anything out from there, no matter how much I want to show you.  Poor, poor bunnies... ;-) (And poor, poor bunnies' mommy... sniffle)

...so   ...  I'll show you the newly acquired stash on-line instead - I got the tiny Bumble Bee kit, the fun looking Scarab Beetle Pouch and the large & absolutely gorgeous Fritillary, Fennel and Scarab Beetle.  Splurge!!  LOL  I love the Snake's Head Frittilary, so this one was a must.

Today I got a couple of neat surprises, that have not been "locked in" yet.  First off, here is the second kit from the Prim Sister Club.  Maybe not quite as cute as the first kit IMO, but still a real sweet design.

Second, a few charts, charms and linen cuts from the Woolly Tyme Club from Homespun Elegance.  I have kicked myself for not signing up to participate at the time, but I wasn't really into prim yet... On the plus-side, the prices are significantly better now ...  So far, I have managed to scrape up 9 out of 12 months which isn't all that bad.  (Still missing November, October, and July.)   I am planning on making a bunny to display the blankets on, instead of the sheep that they were intended for.  Any thoughts?

Before getting back to the bathroom scrubbing, I just need to share a photo of a real snuggle-bunny with you.  Back when we got Princess, he was such an itty-bitty thing.  Bubba was really very mean to him, but he is kinda' like the nice dog in UP! - he just did not get that she didn't adore him!  Well, they did become really good buddies after a while, which is lucky for Bubba; Princess has grown to become twice Bubba's weight since.  He is now too large to fit in the largest size igloo that the pet-store carries.  That tiny ordeal does not stop him from visiting with Bubba, nope.  Here he is, with his head in the igloo, probably getting licked by Bubba, while the rest of him has to stay outside... like Alice after drinking form the wrong bottle...LOL  He is just too funny and still very, very sweet as you can see!

Well, back to the sponges and buckets with me!
Have a great Friday, an even better weekend and don't forget to stitch!  ;-)

The best thing I ever did!

Thanks so much for stopping by today!  I'll show you a quick stitchy-update and after that I will tell you about how I got help to improve my overall health in a pretty dramatic and unexpected way.  I think that many of you will find the read pretty interesting and I definitely think that it is a story well worth sharing.  Maybe my story will give you or someone you know some help, who knows?

Anyway, back to the "important stuff" - stitching!  ;-) 
I finally put the last stitch in the Scarlet Letter shepherdess and actually surprised at how pleased I am with them.  The colors were a bit less exciting than they showed up on the kit cover-photo, but all in all, both of them turned out pretty cute anyway.  (LOL on the sheep/pig/horse... and the black critter is a what..?)

The photo below shows the state before all the hundreds of filling stitches...  I decided to use a riskier strategy and stitched the white critter and the year Assissi style to avoid that the white stitches would be "drenched" in the grass.  It did work out nicely and it also made the actual stitching process a bit more interesting.

The kit came with a dark-blue velvet to mount the pieces on.  I am thinking of trying to find another color velvet.  The thing with velvet is that it doesn't necessarily like to be folded, stuffed into a bag and set on a shelf for a number of years....
The piece I have looks a bit sad now...  The "midnight blue" is also more of a dusty blue and I would like something closer to a gem color, like dark sapphire or emerald.  Any suggestions?  (I know that the "midnight blue" looks black in the photo below.)  I have already decided to do a simple hem-stitching around the pieces and I am actually looking forward to that - I have problems, I know... LOL

I did also finally get myself in gear, looked through my long 2012 WIP list and decided to work on the second Rosenstand bird bell-pull.   There are still many leaves left to stitch on this one, but it is fun and I really enjoy working on it.  The chart is so easy to read, which is a wonderful break after the shepherd and shepherdess.  It is divided into four large pages and the photo belows shows a tad more than a quarter stitched up.  The top-part is the busiest with the "leaf tuft" at the top (I am stitching "center up" and will start on "center down" as soon as the top part is completed).  It will be so much fun to stitch the sweet little bird, so that is something I really look forward to!

This piece and its already finished companion will also be hemmed along the sides before making them into bell-pulls.  After this project is complete, there will be a hemming party at my house... :-)
I picked out a couple of bamboo bell-pull hardware sets to use with these designs - can't wait for these to be done!  I even know where to hang them!!!   :-)

I don't think that I have shown you the companion before, so here it is (should be clickable!):

All right!  On to the health part of this post, so feel free to skip!  :-)
  A few years back I started to feel like I had no energy whatsoever.  I slept badly, it never seemed enough and I was really more passed out than sleeping (I can not recall ever dreaming during this time).  If a colleague so much as sneezed in the same room as I was in, I could pretty much sit back and wait to get sick too and for a really long time - it never failed.  I was eating healthy, exercising regularly (as high impact cardio at least 4 times a week) and I tried to get 7-8 hrs sleep a night.  Yet, something was really not right.

I finally decided to invest in myself and try to get some help.  Instead of going to a doctor that would either give me pills or tell me to change my busy life-style to a slower pace, I went to a holistic medical doctor, recommended to me by a female colleague.  (DH calls her "The Witch Doctor" - LOL)  This doctor is fantastic!  First of all, the doctor was a female, so she could relate to what I was talking about on a whole different plane than any male MD can.
Within meeting her the fist few minutes, she already had a pretty good idea of what was going on.  She told me that I probably had an inflammation in my intestines that had changed my hormone levels, specifically cortisol.  She explained that the change of the cortisol level will affect everything else that goes on in your body - all the other hormone levels will get out of whack automatically, with all the problems that follow.  Furthermore, she explained that she is not a magician, but that this is a really common problem among women and that she had seen it countless times before.

I won't bore you with too many details, but after meeting with my MD about 4-5 times and running a number of (pretty costly, paid out-of pocket) tests through a company called Geneva Diagnostics, it was determined that
- my cortisol levels were completely out of sync with the day rhythm it is supposed to follow.  This explained why I was dead-tired every day at 10AM, but ready to play at 11PM. 
This test is called Rhythm Plus Profile
- the intestinal inflammation was caused by a number of delayed allergies to a vast assortment of foods.  Delayed allergies are just what they sound like, they show up hours or even days after you have  been exposed to the allergen and are there really tricky to pin-point.
The list of foods that I was allergic to was very long and a bit over-whelming at first, but the MD assured me that I only had to carry our detox for 6 months and I would be back to feeling a lot better again.  Just a few examples of things that I was allergic to were (are) corn (this is the one I am very allergic to), cow milk, coffee (this is pretty interesting and may explain why coffee has always made me sleepy rather than perky), sugar, chocolate, yeast, a number of fruits and veggies, all sea-foods including shell-fish, turkey, all seeds, rice, potatoes, and the list goes on.  She informed me that most of her patients do not have the will-power to cut all of the foods that they are allergic to out of their diet, but I did manage stick to it for the half year to come.  It was half a year of not eating out, not eating anything processed, and a lot of time spent reading labels in the store.  (If you think that it is hard to live with gluten allergy, try to buy anything, ice-cream, yogurt, you name it, that is made without corn syrup or corn starch here in the US...  )
This test is called IgG Food Antibody Assessment
- I had about 0% protein in my body and I was told to eat more meat.
This test is called Optimal Nutritional Evaluation or ONE

After the 6 month detox, I did notice some significant and very nice changes:
- My immune system finally got back on track and I could stay healthy - even when co-workers dragged all kinds of stuff in to work
- I had a lot more energy and my sleep pattern started to change - I started remembering dreams, I was awake during the day and I got tired in the evening
- I lost a bunch of weight (not strange, since there was not a whole lot that I could eat)
- My skin improved - finally - after struggling with acne since I was 12!!! more than 2/3rds of my life!  (Lots of heart-ache there, let me tell you...)
- My pain resistance levels went down.  This may sound bad, but in my case, my body could override and "walk off" pains that most people can not function with, which is not a good thing - we are designed to feel pain for a reason.

If you think that this may be something that I may have imagined or changes that were very subtle, I can tell you that I had never ever gotten a compliment on my skin until after I did the detox.  People that I don't really talk with on a regular basis would tell me how nice my skin looked and ask what I had done!
If you feel like I felt a few years back, this may be something to try out.  It is no fun going through life feeling drained, you should not have to live like that if you do! 
Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!

Well, time to start working again.
Take care, have a great weekend and Happy Stitching,

A Large HD

Hi all and thanks so much for all your wonderful comments!  I am especially delighted to hear what you had to say about the fabric choices in my last post.  Get this, not a single person had picked the same fabric!  I love it - that means that whatever I pick, it will be right!

I have to show off my latest finish real quick.  This is the Drawn Thread SAL that I have posted about a couple of times in the past.  Well, she is done; here is Drawn Thread's Sampler of Stitches:

Here is a picture of the entire sampler:

 ...and a close-up of the last part (finished yesterday night):

 

I loved to work on some of the parts while other parts were pretty painful. 

I did notice that I enjoyed stitching the larger areas rather than many, many very small areas.  The larger sections allow you to practice the new stitch and get a flow going.  

I also learned that I love to do pulled thread work!

I have absolutely not idea what I'd like to do with this sampler.  I am looking at it and it is pretty and all, but I am very much undecided.  Right now, I have a real hard time believing that I will ever frame it and hang it on my wall. 

I'll bring it with me to tomorrow's stitch-in and see what my peeps say...

I also got a really nice surprise in the mail earlier this week - my floss from Examplarery arrived, so I guess that the Canadian postal strike is over.    All the text is in and now I get to concentrate on the border, which I really do enjoy!  I think that Queen stitches are a lot of fun.  

It is not all song and dance though; I almost threw a fit yesterday when I realized that the border is not the last part that I have left after all!  I also need to fill in the rest of the grout in the house!  Blah - I am not looking forward to that.  Not  at all.  I know that this is the very last part, and that it should be "easy" since it is just filling in areas with cross-stitch, but it is that boring "invisible thread" type stitching, so I am real keen on skipping it all together.  I know that I won't, but I will at least dream about it for a while... [ Oh, and I should probably work on whining less too.  ;-)]

And this is the final stitch-update for tonight - the Rosenstand bird bell-pull in coming along nicely.  I think that I have completed 1 page out of 4 now, which is not too bad.  As I mentioned in the last post, it really is a long piece, but the stitching-intensity is pretty low, due to all the naked areas. 

This is yet another one of those kits where the colors on the cover-photo have very little resemblance to the real thing.  The real-life colors are much brighter and greener than the dull browns and olive greens in the picture.  Luckily, I still like the way it looks, so that is great.  The bird is clamping onto the bamboo (I think that is what it is) very close to the bottom on this design.  I am already looking forward to stitch on him!  But fist there is a large tuft of leaves to take care of at the top of the bamboo.

Lastly, I wanted to show you the somewhat funny in a low-key (and probably low-cost) way; the "fortune cookies" that we get from the Thai restaurant close to work.  We eat lunch there about every other week and I have now convinced my co-workers to ask for the statement cookies rather than fortune cookies with the bill.  Here is the interesting mix of random sentences we got last time:

All in all, pretty funny, I think!  My coworkers do this thing, that I am sure is in no way unique for that group, where they read the fortune to the rest of the lunch participants and always end the fortune with "in bed" to make it all so much more amusing.  

After glancing at the examples above, I don't think that "sprucing up" is necessary at all.  But, now again, DH keeps claiming that I have an odd sense of humor and that I am easily amused...  I hope that maybe one of you, dear blog readers, has the same type of humour.  Makes the world such a more amusing place to be, doesn't it!?

Well, time to get to bed.  We have a "morale boost even" at work tomorrow, which means that we will have to play games and eat sandwiches in the park from 10 AM to 2 PM.  I am looking forward to it, even though I have a feeling that we will be up in the 80:s temperature wise.  Take into account that I am the type of woman who "glistens" bucket-fulls and  you get the picture.  Not necessarily a pretty one....   :-b

Take care, stay out of the heat, and have a wonderful weekend!

Ditching Stitching

Hello and Happy Sunday Everybody!
I am posting a quickie about a non-stitch related project that was a lot of fun.  Thursday evening, I decided to get out the bracelet kits that I got form French General and give jewelry making a shot.  It was so much fun to do and so quick!  After just a few hours, I ended up with four beautiful bracelets.  It is so nice to work on a project that can be done in one day every now and then and I had so much fun that I had to go back to the FG web-site and look at the rest of the bracelet kits.  I was good though; I decided to pace myself.  They have a photo of a gorgeous turquoise bracelet, but the kit is sold out (which is probably good...).  Anyway, here they are; the three thinner ones came as one kit.  The thicker one with glass raspberries is definitely the favorite and I have already worn it out. 

 

The next jewelry adventure is this button bracelet kit that I have had lying around for 2-3 years now.  This project will probably take a little bit longer to get done.  The base is stringed beads and from that, bead fringes are added using needle and thread to weave the fringes into the base.  There is a lot of beads and buttons in this kit, so I think that I need to wait for a day when I am fully awake and alert to do this.  I can totally see myself accidentally flip over the bead bags and spread beads all over the house.

 

I am always a bot concerned about using beads.  No matter how careful I am, I always lose a couple and I can only guess that most of them end up in the carpet somewhere.  Seeing that the parrots like to take a frequent stroll across the living-room floor, plus they love to chew on just about anything they find and can get away with, so glass seed beads are best not sprinkled across the floor.  

You can't imagine how hard it is to make a parrot spit.  They are stubborn and those beaks are designed to hold on to whatever they found. If you manage to bend the tiny mouth open, you'll find that they love to "hide" things that they don't want to share under their beaks...  Good times!  ;-)

I did finish up the mini bell-pull with blue birds from Fremme on Wednesday.

 

I mentioned that I was thinking about making it into a pillow.  Here below are the current thoughts and comparisons.  I like the last fabric choice best, even though the first two choices would make more sense, since they are home decorator fabric.  The three latter fabrics are made by the Japanese fabric design company Echino.  If you are not familiar with Echino, check out their fabrics!  They are gorgeous - classy, trendy, colorful, simple, cool!  The best source to have a peek at Echino's collections is probably Etsy; here!  I was thinking that I'd try to finish the pillow this weekend, but that will likely not happen.  I have too much fun cleaning the house and doing laundry....  ;-)

I did also pull out an old WIP; a really long bird bellpull from Eva Rosenstand.  As you can see, not a whole lot of progress has been done on this one.  If I stick to it, I know that I can get it done within a couple of weeks, since it is a huge piece of linen, but with a relatively pretty sparse amount of stitches.  I stitched up the mate last year and I know where I would like to hang them, so I really should focus...
I have not forgotten the Richmond sampler - I promise!  The "pale" sunflower is now golden and I have almost completed one out of the four border sides.  Those queen-stitches take time, but it looks great!  All in all, only 3 sides of the border and the rest of the text (with the missing silk floss) left to do!

  

Well, time to get going.  DH and I are going out on an adventure.  I'll tell you more about that another day!

Take care and Happy Stitching,

My Godmother's Danish Cross-Stitch and American Quilts Collections (and TUSAL Update....)

So, I haven't been real productive with my stitching lately.  The trip to Sweden was full of adventures until late in the nights and I managed to catch a cold towards the end.  I am still trying to recover and had to stay home sick from work today - too tired to stitch!
Anyway, I will probably post a couple of additional "Sweden Trip" posts, but I have too many photos to share, so it is pretty much necessary to divide the different days and activities up a bit.

Anyway, since I know that many of you are as much into stitching as I am, I just have to share some photos that I took while we visited my mother's cousin, my godmother, and her family for lunch last Saturday.  We had a lovely time and it was a lot of fun to see her and her husband and their two sons, the daughter-in-law, and the brand new grandson.  We were treated to sea food followed by tiramisu and coffee.  Well to be honest, my godmother, mom and I almost missed dessert since we were busy looking around in all my godmothers stash collection rooms.  It was a real familiar feel; the packed rooms, the clever "hiding places", the sorting systems that are completely undecipherable to anyone but the mastermind behind it...  all of this was pretty much like looking at my own stash through someone else's eyes.  And a real treat!
My godmother has been stitching for about 30 years now.  She mentioned that she started to practice embroidery when she was very young, I forget exactly how young, but I seem to recall that she was 5.  She explained that her mother needed to find something to occupy her with so that she would sit still for a few minutes, since she was a really high energy child.  My godmother started to stitch Danish designs, Clara Waever/Eva Rosenstand and Fremme (both fantastic companies of which I am a huge fan) thanks to my late grandmother, who ordered a lot of their kits through the woman's journals back in the 70:s.
We talked a lot about stitching and it was pretty funny to hear my father tell me that he was so impressed that I knew which company had designed what design.   I guess that maybe my family has never quite realized the depth of my obsession with stitching...  ;-)

Well, we had a great time.  We looked at my godmother's kit and pattern collection, admired a lot of her finished work, and even looked through some old Clara Waever catalogs to compare notes on what we like and what we are not real excited about.  I took a bunch of photos for you, so that you can have a look!  Here you can see both Fremme and Waever design finished as wall pictures and as table cloths.  Some have yet to be finished, which I believe is something that is often a bit of a challenge to many of us stitchers.  What to do with the finished design?  A table cloth, a wall picture, a pillow case, a gift to someone, or what?

 

 

 

 

My godmother is also a quilter and teaches classes in quilting.  She has taken trips to the US concentrating specifically on quilting and stash enhancement!  The US flag quilt below was stitched form fabric picked up in the US at a couple of different occasions.

 

 

 And finally, an adorable table-cloth from a Swedish design company made using traditional embroidery.  Too cute!  I just love geraniums, so this design really speaks to me!

What do you think about that!?  Pretty fabulous, right!?

Before I stop, I just have to share something sweet with you.  My mother proudly displays the things I stitch for her around the house in the most unexpected ways.  The pocket I stitched for her is now hanging around a floor lamp in the living room, which is also the permanent home of a couple of Christmas ornaments and a book-mark that I stitched for her years ago.  This is how you know that your gifts are appreciated!  :-)

 

Well, time to hop to bed.  I should get an early start on the sleep, so that I can get myself and my cold into work tomorrow.  I am already feeling better tonight than I did most of today, so I'd better ride this wave...

Real quick, before I go - this is the April TUSAL update.  A terrible photo, I know, but it is fun to see how the orts are beginning to fill the jar:

Good Night and Happy Dreams about Stitching,