Maria Kristina Kiellström (15 June 1744 – 20 January 1798), known as Maja Stina, was a Swedish silk worker and alleged prostitute, and most famously the fictional demimonde prostitute or Rococo "nymph" Ulla Winblad in the songs called Fredman's Epistles by Sweden's troubadour, Carl Michael Bellman, who made her a major character in his work. Biography Kiellström was born into a poor family in what was then the poor area of Ladugårdslandet in Stockholm. Her mother died when she was five years old. Her father, Johan Kiellström, was originally in the artillery, but he was forced to resign from the military because of epilepsy, and supported himself as a street sweeper. Her father remarried a woman by the name Catharina Elisabeth Winblad, and Maja Stina occasionally used her stepmother's name Winblad ("vineleaf"). From the age of fourteen, Kiellström supported herself. Her first work was that of a domestic, but in 1763, she is listed as a silk worker. During the 1760s, she became acquainted with the songwriter and performer Carl Michael Bellman, and they are known to have dined and danced with each other. In 1765, she gave birth to a daughter who died after eight days. The father of the child was Colonel Wilhelm Schmidt from the Swedish nobility in Russian service, who promised to marry her but abandoned her and left for Russia. During these years, she was alleged to have been a prostitute. Historians, however, have found nothing to confirm this allegation. According to August Gynther, there is no record of her ever having worked at a tavern either. She was at one occasion suspected by her landlord for immoral life style, but was by others described as an orderly and dutiful worker. It is confirmed that she regularly took communion in church, something she would likely not have been allowed to do had she been a prostitute. Neither was she ever placed in the Långholmens spinnhus for prostitution. According to historical records, she was only arrested once, and the reason was not prostitution. In 1767, she was arrested for wearing silk, which was normally banned for commoners and laborers under the Sumptuary laws of the time. She was discharged after having proved that she was a silk worker and thereby entitled by law to wear silk despite being a commoner. In 1772, she married Eric Nordström, a childhood friend of Bellman, who was helped by Bellman