It has been a while.... :-)

Well, after almost three weeks of silence here at Nirvana, I'd better roll up my sleeves and start typing!  Part of the reason is that I really haven't been stitching all that much lately - I have discovered a new hobby; napping!  LOL  I should feel a little bit ashamed of myself - the photos have been loaded and ready to go for about two weeks now...  Well, here we go!

As you may remember, my parents were here for 10 days earlier this month, so I didn't get a whole lot stitched then as you can imagine.  We did get out on adventures pretty much every day - Andy was working nights all the week through, which complicated things a bit (don't even get me started on his crazy schedule - sigh!  I just about had it!!!!).

I did work a tiny bit on the new Prim Sisters kit, which turned out to be much sweeter than I thought initially.  A quick stitch, so I got a bit done while my parents were here and it was really fast to finish up after they left for Sweden.

I did some smaller changes to the back by adding my initials and the year (+ accidentally picking the wrong colors for the heart...) and I have decided to finish this piece into a zippered pocket instead of the gigantic needle-book that it is intended to be.  This time, the kit included a bit more fabric to do the finishing work with, so that gives me all kinds of freedom - yay!

So far, this has been a great club and I am looking forward to the next set.

Last weekend (I think - time flies), I was participating with a booth at the Founders Craft Fair here in town.  Since my camera batteries were dead, there are no photos to show from this year, but if you'd like to get an idea about how things look, it was very similar to last year's event.  We did have a slight lesser number of booths indoors this year, but it did feel like a lot more people came by.

The two main-questions I got this year were different versions of "Oh, you are doing needle point?"  (how come that everyone is familiar with needle-point, but not cross-stitch, I wonder?) and "How much are they?".  I had to explain quite a few times why the items in the display were not for sale and people seemed to be genuinely surprised (you know the blurb about stitching time and material costs, yada-yada).  It is funny; nowadays so many of us assume that everything is for sale; in this industrial era we don't ever stop to think about how much time it actually takes to make things by hand.  It also seems that many of us think that  the ultimate goal is to make a profit out of what we do, not to find joy in developing a skill and and the feeling of peace of mind.

Well, while interacting sporadically with people (it was still far from being packed), I did get time to work on two Patrick's Woods pieces.  The first one was the little Hare Lines kit that is a small note-book accessory to go with the Hare Pyns set.  The only thing I really had left to do was the border, which was a little bit tricky, and the initials but I did finally get it done and I do like the way it turned out.

I did also start on this sweet little mattress-style pin-cushion, which I am looking forward to doing the finishing work on.  Sherri printed the vintage violet girl on some muslin type fabric and created a lovely design in purples (tent-stitch over one, so not too bad).  I finished the stitching in the evening and now it is lying on the ever growing finishing pile at home.  The purple felt will be cut out into a double heart shape and used for a little needle holder.

Note the pretty wooden cutting board below.  Andy and I picked that up at Shaker Village when we were there with my parents.  I'll show you the photos from that excursion in my next post.

I did also pick up this sweet little picture at Shaker Village - Oh, how I wish that I would have bought many, many more to share!  Note the text written in cross-stitches - just adorable!  It will probably get framed and hung somewhere in the house one of these days.

Other than that, not much to report right now.  I have gotten a few shipments of stash lately, which has been fun.  The Halloween Fob in the picture below was an E-bay find and the charts were a draw of luck (or rather, a draw of suspicion or "covering my a$$") a few weeks back.
Remember when Guilia Punto Antichi came out with the adorable Shabby Chic Pendant earlier this year?  Well, suspicious as I am, I read through countless kit descriptions at several needlework stores on-line, but I could not find anything that clearly informed me what the kit really included.
My feel was that if the button did not come with the kit, it was a waste of a pretty good deal of money.  And you know the deal about exchanging patterns - not gonna' happen!  I even made a few phone calls to various stores to be sure, but none could give me a straight yes or no (that should have been my first clue, LOL).
Well, I finally placed the order with Stitching Bits & Bobs but sent Bobbi an e-mail where I stated that, unless the button came with the kit, I was not interested.
Lo and behold, a couple of weeks later, the "kit" showed up in my mail box and it was nothing but a chart pack - for $16!  I mean - wow, that is a bit hefty in my humble opinion!!!  Luckily, when I called Bobbi and pointed out that I had sent her the e-mail (which she admitted to not have read), she exchanged the chart for a store credit so I got the three charts below instead!  Not bad at all...  Two of them I have been wanting for a while, so that was like Xmas!

The EMS sampler is coming along all right.  This is not the latest update I have, but it took longer to stitch this time.  I did struggle with the mushroom motif which I had already decided to switch for something else - the question was what!?  I will show you how that turned out next time, but I have to say that I am pretty pleased. I am anxiously awaiting part 6 - only a couple of days more!

And finally, this is a new sampler that I just started stitching for someone very special!  This secret person does not read my blog so I will be able to share the progress with you.  This is another kit from my favorite design house, Haandarbejdets Fremme in Denmark.  This piece is also a bit further along, but I'll have to share that progress with you next time as well.  

This sampler is only stitched with five colors and as you can see from the photos below, it is stitched in Assisi style, which is one of my favorite styles.  Close-up here:

And this will be the size of the sampler, once finished.  I am having so much fun stitching on this one!  I really like the quality of the Fremme's designs and kits!  (That may be the reason why I have a drawer packed full of Fremme kits at home.... )

Well, time to get back to the robot here in the lab.
Have a great week and wishes of many hours of Happy Stitching!  (I owe most of you a visit, so that is on the top of the to-do list now, even before napping!)

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!  ;-)

Drumroll please....

Huge Congratulations to the 100-Nirvana-Followers-Giveaway winners, Chris from Tot Hill Farm Stitches and Jo from Serendipitous Stitches!!!

About three things that make Chris happy:
"1. I saw the first hummingbird of the season
2. I had some time in the evening to stitch and have Binx sleep on my lap
3. My husband, my best friend :)"
Chris was drawn to win the Sit and Stitch from With Thy Needle and Thread, complete with thread pack!  Congratulations Chris!

And Jo says:
"My three things which make me happy are: My Boys, my online stitching pals and shiny pennies. I work in a bookshop and I love it when we get a new bag of pennies from the bank and they're all shiny and pretty."
Jo is the lucky winner of With My Needle's April Word-Play .

If you send me an e-mail with your addresses, I will send you the new stash ASAP!  :-)
Thanks so much to everyone who signed up for the drawing - you made several of my days!  It was so enjoyable and really inspiring to read about what makes all of you happy!  Happiness really comes in the simplest packages, don't you think?

This week, I am happy about something special that doesn't happen very often.  My parents are coming to visit for 10 days!  The will arrive on Friday evening after a long journey from Stockholm.  This year the weather is cooperating here in Kentucky, so we will have plenty of opportunities to enjoy the outdoors.

Thanks so much again and have a a wonderful week!  I may be able to squeeze in a stitching post later this week, but I foresee a lot of house cleaning in my near future... LOL
Happy Stitching,

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,

Cool Stitching

Do you ever feel like using cross-stitch to rebel against all conventions?  You know, like when a large crowd of knitters run up to a bus and cover it in a humongous shawl?  (Pic borrowed from this blog!)

I do, quite often.  Working as an engineer and following (what feels like) 10,000 rules per day, some corporate rules, other rules of science, I sometimes dream about doing the crazy, expressive and unexpected in stitching instead...

I am also a total web-addict and "picture hoarder", so I have been gathering up these links for a while.  I thought that you may would enjoy some "craft outside the box" as much as I do, so here we go.

I found one site that has a lot of various craft anarchy pinned; Urban Thread's blog Stitch Punk.  The name says it all, I think.  Here you can look through pages of really cool and rebellious craft - or rather, craft taken to (post)modern art.  Here are just a few examples:

 

 

So that is cool, but here is the stuff that I really love - cross-stitch!
Easter eggs by Forostyuk Inna, the folk master of Luhansk region in Ukraine. Materials used are goose eggs, and acrylic floss.

Or these discarded every-day metallic objects, cross stitched by Serverija Incirauskaite - isn't this just the coolest!?  Now I want to go down to the basement and borrow Alpha-Bunny's drill....

 
 Her art reminds me of this sweet bracelet by Corina Reitveld (if you live in Europe, you can buy these pre-drilled cuffs from Panduro Hobby - pretty sure that's a Swedish company btw...)

Here are some other neat XS items, iPhone covers from Connect Design.  If you click on the link, you will find a bunch of different covers and patterns that you can use for other stitching adventures as well.

And finally, more traditional but still pretty cool, are the pillows, tea cosies and place mats from the Danish blog Tulipan og Tomater.  Here are some really pretty ways to combine patch-work with smaller XS designs into something useful and really wonderful:

I am guessing that the blog owner buys up bunched of vintage cross-stitch pieces that none wants anymore and she turns them into unique items that she sells in her store or at fairs.  Now, that is a clever concept and right with the times too, reuse, reduce, recycle!  (I am pretty much 100% sure that the butterflies patterns can be found in one of Fremme's old XS calendars.)

Well, that's it for now.  Don't forget to sign up for the giveaway!
Take care and Happy Stitching,