Tending A Garden

The Sun Room in our home, which has long been my studio, has an overgrown English Garden look to it. As the years have gone by, the variety of “plants and outcroppings” have multiplied and are bursting with color and texture.

There’s the Drawing Garden where a myriad of sketchbooks, paints, cups filled with markers and pens nearly hide a drawing table with current sketchbooks open and ready for filling up with lines and marks.

The Spinning Garden often takes up the middle of the room, perhaps like a pond would, where wheels whir with wool and blended fibers of all kinds for making yarn.

The Weaving Garden is tucked around the edges of the room as looms are stowed away until they are needed. Small looms for weaving cloth as well as tapestry dot these outer borders and require little upkeep until one or more are brought out for use. Note that these are not included in the above sketch. They are more recent acquisitions to the Garden.

Knitting and crochet plants…er projects…are scattered about the Garden plot mostly encased in fabric bags to keep the Garden Cat Milo from unknitting them all!

This beloved space is also home to a menagerie of critters who have come to life in my sketchbooks. They lead highly creative lives in their various houses and lands. The Spinning House is where Macy and Purl run a spinning business along with other mouse helpers, a tiny cat named Clarissa, and a few tomtens who keep things lively. Marisol the Mouse lives in Yarn Drobe where Mortimer and Millicent are the King and Queen of Sun Room, ruling with kindness and grace. In the Big House up on Keys Hill live Henrietta the Hedgehog, some chickens, a few small sheep and more tomtens. They keep up with large supplies of weaving yarns even though it looks as if there is no organization whatsoever.

Bertie, my green knitted bear whose full name is Bertram Dalrymple the Third, and I relish being here to draw our lives and to make things. It is a beautiful place from which to go on adventures, however exciting or humdrum they may be. Life always inspires us and I love to drawcument everything especially the “flowers” that grow in my Garden here in Kernersville, NC where I live with my husband and two of our three wonderful nearly-all-grown-up children.

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”

-Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Welcome to mine. 💖

***

Jennifer Edwards

6 thoughts on “Tending A Garden

  1. Elizabeth Marley says:

    Yeah! I have just taught myself to knit and crochet over the last year and I am very excited that you are sharing this blog with us. I have loved reading Drawn2Life and being able to share in the gifts our Father has graced you with. I am just as excited to see all the beautiful things in yarn!

  2. Dar Draper says:

    Jennifer!! Everything you write, draw and EXPRESS in anyway makes me HAPPY!! 🙂 I’m so glad I’m officially signed up now! I seriously am SUCH a fan of who you are!! Can’t wait to keep on reading and seeing… 🙂

    • Jennifer Edwards says:

      Hi Dar!!! So happy to see you here in my little patch of blogland. And I wish you every blessing on your own recent book writing journey!! May it fare well and go smoothly start to finish! Love, love to you. -Jennifer

  3. Sarah Richards says:

    Hey Jennifer, I am looking for someone to come teach some beginners knitting and crocheting classes to our seniors at the Thomasville Senior Center. Would you be interested? We would love to have your expertise!

  4. Fay Terry says:

    This is wonderful! I really enjoyed meeting you
    In the gallery this afternoon. I loved the video on drawing- absolutely incredible.
    I would love to keep in touch with you and your beautiful creations.

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