Time moves. Spring has begun its magical decent into the five-acre wood. This is our sixth spring here, and I’ve been enjoying digging in the dirt nearly daily throughout the year, slowly moving through every inch of the land. Most of my work has been ungardening, which allows me to sweat and think and grow stronger. It is the gardening that I am afraid of — what to put where and how! I do not envision (I may not have this skill at all), I just move. But the land no longer wears its thorny drapery and untraversable barbed bushes, and when Pearl steps outside, she doesn’t return with dozens of ticks and sometimes she returns with none — a remarkable transformation!

Last winter, Amy, a gardener friend, shared some insight which has made the land this spring, not just an undoing project, but a transformative one for me, the pollinators, and the passers-by. Small spring ephemerals are blooming all around, though the deer and geese are munching them at an irritating pace.

May Apple Rhizome	May Apple Plant!

Søren’s May Apple Specimen Card	Søren’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit Specimen Card!

Jack-in-the-Pulpit Corm	Jack-in-the-Pulpit Plant

Plant Pirate! Flower Bandit!

I discovered an acre of Snowdrops and Winter Aconite when trees were cut down for another Wawa in the area, and filled my truck with plants. When I went back and tried 'the right" way, (I asked), the plants were destroyed within a week.

I know better than to ask. Why did I falter?

Snowdrops and Winter Aconite at a new Wawa site.

Toots and Yedda have been returning to Pond Island for 6 years! We’ve seen them thrive and struggle year after year. So far, their 5 goslings are thriving — no catastrophes, but there is a coyote on the loose!

Søren’s Toots + Yedda Specimen Card	Yedda and her Goslings

Pearl, my love! She ran out into the darkness (was it the coyote?) with fervor — straight into the new wheelbarrow we left in the path. She is recovering, but I do wonder if the wheelbarrow saved her from a worse encounter.

My nursery, Bluebells and my studio, deer munched Dutch tulips, scented daffodils and the Peg and Awl barn in the background, and wood poppy!

Specimen Cards

We have Garter and Northern Water Snakes here...	And a variety and abundance of frogs and toads!

We also have a family of Painted Turtles!	All of these creatures live by and in the untended to ponds.

Our Pearl!	Piplup is the last of our many chickens and guineas. She has somehow survived the many attacks of foxes, &c.

At Home Exploration

We’ve returned home from Florida, where winter’s end, hormones, lawn talk, and chain stores wreaked havoc on my mood the first day. Fortunately, for myself and everyone around me, a walk around Wakodahatchee Wetlands quickly settled my inner chaos. Florida, like anywhere, can be so many things at once!

Back home, at the Five Acre Wood, Pearl and I awoke early to sunshine and went outside to visit all the plants’ changes during our weekend away. The three small Witch Hazel transplants survived: their tiny yellow flowers small and sparkly in the woodland. A few Squill, Hellebores, and Crocuses have flowered. Snowdrops have bloomed by the thousands, the snow drop math proving successful here though when I step back, the little clumps have a lot of multiplying to do before they change this comparatively expansive landscape! Even more Daffodils are about to burst, whilst Hepatica, Foam Flower, Geraniums, and other greenies have sent their distinct tops out of the soil and into the sun! A few years ago, I couldn’t have identified these plants by their flowers, and here I am, calling them by their names so soon. It feels magical, this ever-learning.

I’ve planted thousands of plants since we moved here five years ago. Some will take five years to bloom; others have already started on their journey, only to be destroyed by my rambunctious Pearl or over-eager deer families, hopping the fence when Pearl is elsewhere.

Snowdops by Silas	Jack-in-the-Pulpit by Søren

May Apple by Søren	Daffodils (most abundant) by Silas

Bamboo by Silas	Virginia Bluebell by Søren

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Shop Our Specimen Cards!

Our Specimen Card Notebook!	Story on the back!

Some of the boys’ early drawings on the end pages!	It fits inside our Sendaks!

Smudge and Other Pandemic Pages

“If you like to write or draw or dance or sing, do it because it’s great: as long as we’re playing around like that, we don’t feel lonely, and our hearts warm up.”
–from The Woman Who Killed the Fish by Clarice Lispector

I’ve been making books and filling them for as long as I can remember. The books pile up – a slow and steady drip of ink on paper that may someday push us out of our home. One of the gifts of the pandemic is a clear time frame. I’ve decided to go back into my journals – specifically, into the pandemic pages, to see what I could find. I found the patterns of our lives on repeat, everything obsessively documented as if we wouldn’t live without record of it. I found Pearl, and plants, grief and illness, disappearance and disappointment, homeschooling, camping, movement, and details so small I needed the quiet of a pandemic to experience them. It is a strange vocation, to be this kind of capturer of the quotidian.

“What is the conversation?” asks Claire, a few times. Conversation? I don’t know how to answer that. The conversation is on the pages, extracted from life, fragments rearranged, stories imagined, reimagined. Patterns, tatters. Is there ever an actual anything, or is everything imagined? There isn’t a conversation – there are infinite conversations and there are no conversations. It depends on who stands in front of what, and where. It depends on who is next to them. How engaged they are. How curious. It depends on what I say here, if anything, and whether you read it. Will you?

Just before the pandemic, I chose a word for the year, for 2020: The word was lightness. I wrote:

“My word for the year is lightness. I love this idea of finding a word to live alongside. So far, (so early but so far), it has freed me from the fear of not making the right marks. It has led me to say yes to a wintry adventure at the seashore where with wet knees and raisoned fingers, we searched for Cape May diamonds with the enthusiasm of children whilst the actual children played with drones, dipped their feet (and pants) into the frigid water, gathered a few specimens, and made their way back to the warm car. These are things that I love, but the weight of obligation and difference and the world’s expectations make it difficult to be so light. The more I forget this, the longer I sit. The longer I sit, the heavier I get – the weight of the dust settling upon me. Lightness. The word, my companion, reminds me to hover and to float – to move and to keep moving.”

It was the right choice, this word, and it came just in time.

From A Tear and A Seed	A sneaky peek!

The Things That I remember Are Not in These Photographs	SMUDGE! Left-handed (non-dominant) hand drawings.

A Tear and A Seed... drawings from a book I didn’t illustrate.	A stack of my smudge journals!

Our First Storefront! 

Shop Our Shop!

“...the impeded stream is the one that sings.”
–from Our Real Work by Wendell Berry

The pileup is usually an effective way of moving us into high speed. We will open our barn doors tomorrow, for the first time, as a Peg and Awl storefront! It will also be filled with our art, which is most often squirreled away under our rounded bodies as we scribble, cut, or swish with whatever materials are at hand upon our pages.

We are still scrambling, but hope you come by and say hey! Email us for the address or find it at the Chester County Studio Tour website. Parking is limited – if ours is filled, park in the nearby neighborhood! If I have time, I’ll mow some roadside invasives for side-of-the-road parking.

Pouches!	We have a new batch of A Rural Pen ink!

Seaside Tote, Caddies, &c.	Some of our Last Chance waxed canvas bags are in the storefront!

New Prints from A Tear and A Seed (coming soon to our website, maybe...)	We will stock our jewelry in this old treasure!

Walter, Søren, and Silas!

We are still working and will share updates on Instagram! 

Søren has been working on this gigantic map for months! Come see it in progress or on Instagram @sorenscoutkent

Silas has been working with Copic markers and recently has been drawing cars, an interest he shares with his Pop – his grandfather!	Walter will be sharing portraits and landscapes in oil and pencil. He is still navigating his space! @pegandawlbuilt and @pegandawl

Everywhere, Astonishments!

The Chester County Studio Tour features 200 artists including one of my very favourite humans – Claire Rosen, at her home, Warwick Furnace Farm.	Heidi, whom I trust I’ll meet in person someday, is another wondrous being whom I am grateful to know. This book is gorgeous. Her language, exploration, and connection to the earth has inspired me for years. Now, in book form, tis utter magic!

We’re Moving Out of Philadelphia
...and it's bittersweet!

We are very fortunate – as a family and small business owners – to be able to follow our curiosities to wherever they may lead. Here we find ourselves in another major transition! We – Walter and I, Søren and Silas too, have decided to sell the Peg and Awl building in Port Richmond Philadelphia, and move our business into our Barn here in Chester County, Penna. It felt like a quick decision, but it was the culmination of much quiet consideration. I have always been spontaneous – or so it seems – so much is accomplished in our sleep.

Yesterday was warm and wondrous. As I walked from Port Richmond to Old City for a last minute hair appointment at Barnet Fair, and to treasure hunt at Vagabond Boutique, I felt the weight of nostalgia for what we would soon be leaving, and a lightness too, as I imagined floating, for the first time in a while, into a new unknown.

Lights off – we were about to leave on Saturday but paused for a quick mirror family photograph!	Our barn as seen from the woods!

Some Things to Look Forward to in the Coming Year!

• New Website! We’ve been working on it for a long time – we don’t have a launch date yet, but soon!
• New Jewellery! If you’ve been following along on Instagram – you may have seen some glimpses of these projects over the past few years.
• New Of A Kind Adventures! (accompanied by more Flea Market adventures, read here!)
• Exciting Pivots!

The Foundlings (Peg and Awl) Building: Before and After

Read about the Shop Renovation Project, here!

We’ve put a lot of work into our workshop since we bought the dark and closed-up building in 2016 – from opening cinder-blocked windows and tearing down walls, to transforming the gravel and pavement into gardens. We built and set up a storefront (that we never officially opened) just before the pandemic. We poured concrete floors and filled the wide open space with an abundance of tools and machines and worked with our wonderous crew to design, make, and ship all of the treasures that we share around the world.

We look forward to the next adventure for Peg and Awl and, too, for the building! The dream is always for some magic makers to take the reins and re-imagine a better, brighter, greener, and cleaner corner of Philadelphia.

A lot happens through word of mouth — if you know someone who may be interested, please share!

The Listing for Our Building

After Storefront, trees, plants, and windows!	Before A lightless old space full of stuff.

After Employee gardens and honey bees~	Before Concrete slab (though locals told us it was a wading pool in the summers and an ice hockey rink in the winters!)

After A part of the woodshop!	During Pouring the concrete floor.

During Knocking down the in-between wall.	Before

Renovations and the inhabiting of the nearly abandoned building in Port Richmond, Philadelphia.

Read Here!

The Barn: Our New Shop

Read On: Our Barn Restoration Project

We will continue to make treasures in Philadelphia over the next few months. In May, we will be opening our new workspace to the public for a Studio Tour in May! There we will share our art, showroom, and the goings on of the new iteration of Peg and Awl.

This space will be a gallery and showroom.

Walter’s cozy loft studio will remain Walter’s cozy loft studio.

Our Barn Restoration Project

Read On: Our Barn Restoration Project

“...By the time we had finished removing the rotted bits, the trusses, the rafters, and the floors, it was hard to say if we were reclaiming an old barn, or building a new one in its image. The barn shape – the space within the frame – became one of the few parts I could solidly say remained from the historic place. But over the next few weeks, as I observed the delicate skeleton of the old barn standing strong but precarious in the wind and rain – with day now inside and night inside too – I grew suspicious of this boundaryless thing I wanted to keep. What were we preserving, and more, why?”

The Old Barn from the road.	We hired Precise Buildings to rebuild the barn!

Original wall that divides the two parts of the barn. Pearl and Søren, my loves.	A new view!

The first abandoned house I remember exploring was across from the grocery store my mom and I skipped to, arm in arm, when I was in 7th grade. We had seen its decaying Victorian turrets peeking above the abundance of neglected foliage many times before braving its withered threshold. Early one Spring, we ventured into that liminal space and I don't believe I ever completely left. Inside reeked of piss and mildew. Broken bottles and yellowed newspapers made a foul floor for weekend teenagers. But in the center – beneath a makeshift skylight and its funnel of wintry, warm, yellow sun – grew a single white tulip. Discovering this unexpected beauty with my mom so long ago, was surely a heavy pour in the cocktail of experiences from my youth that helped determine who I was to become.⁠

Three years ago, just one year after officially beginning our homeschool adventure with Søren and Silas, we decided to move out of Philadelphia in search of a new home amongst the trees. We quickly stumbled upon the patch of land that we’ve come to call The Five Acre Wood – consisting of a ton of invasive growth, some lawn, woods, ponds, animals, two creeks, our house (built in the late 1700s or early 1800s), a spring house (formerly our studio) and – just across the road – a dilapidated barn. Truly, our timing was perfect.

The Old Barn from the road.	We hired Precise Buildings to rebuild the barn!

In the listing Walter had spied a corner of the barn – a cautious partial revealing of this daunting danger for most, we reckoned, and possibly the reason the house had been on the market for so long. But we dreamed of transforming the barn into a studio for art, homeschooling, woodworking, and yoga. Two years after our move, with the sale of our Philadelphia home (previously serving as an Airbnb), we were able to embark on this new adventure.

The project began with the removal of decades – centuries even – of junk that had been accumulating. We briefly considered hauling the stuff to a flea market to help fund the barn restoration, but after moving some of it out (there was so much!) we ordered a dumpster, and set everything curious in rows in the grass for the taking. There were chairs, well-loved ice skates, wooden sleds, tons of old bottles and antique toys – and then came the people – making it a strange theatre. The conversations that arose during the treasure-dispersal resulted in many journal pages of quotidian conversations which reveal people to be anything but the perceived everyday.

Most of these strange treasures found homes...	The telephone operator thing went to a musician who plans to turn it into something musical.

After the emptying, came the digging of an incredibly deep well which resulted in the grinding and unexpected excavating of Wissahickon Schist – also known as trash stone – from which our house was built. I collected a salad container full and transformed some of the pre-ground pigment into paint for my Iris Painter’s Palette.

Look for Bioplastic Pans of this handmade watercolor paint in our First Of a Kind Collection of the Year!	Wissahickon Schist — also known as Trash Stone — makes a gorgeous ghost green colour.

We then removed the lead-free wood siding, the tin roof, the old doors, the flooring, and some beams, with the intention of re-using as much of this as possible in different places both inside of the barn and out. When the township inspector came and saw the rotted state of the exposed bits that were revealed, we had to embark upon a plan b, which brings to mind The Ship of Theseus.

By the time we finished removing the rotted bits, the trusses, the rafters, the floors, it was hard to say if we were reclaiming an old barn or building a new one in its image. The barn shape– the space within the frame – became one of the few parts I could solidly say remained of the historic place. But over the next few weeks – as I observed the delicate skeleton of the old barn standing strong but precarious in the wind and rain, with day now inside and night inside too – I grew suspicious of this boundaryless thing I wanted to keep. What were we preserving, and more, why?

Putting on a new roof before taking it off to remove more of the old.	Delicate skeleton of the old barn.

After getting over the long pause whilst figuring out plan b...	A new view!

Most of the structure is new now, but within it is a tapestry of old materials. Walter transformed the old extinct-ish American Chestnut tree trunk beams into two glorious sets of double doors. An old second floor door, which led to an unsurvivable drop, is now part of the bathroom. The old floorboards were flipped and trimmed and woven with old floorsboards from other barns, and together have been sanded and oiled. The crooked skeleton of hand-hewn wood with its mortise and tenon joints, trunnels, and roman numeral marriage marks, lingers charmingly in the middle of the new open space. The white-washed wall, that once held tobaggons, hockey sticks, and fishing poles still divides the two main spaces. The stone-walled basement, where the barn’s last farm animal – a calf – lived in the 1960s, will soon be a woodshop and ceramic studio. We put windows and skylights throughout the building, replacing the vertical cracks that let only slivers of light in for the past 200 or so years.

The shape within the frame remains, but the air that flowed through it like water through a river, has surely been fully turned over. Already, the newly brightened space has illuminated a life unimagined by the original builders, including family yoga, the beginning of a writing and drawing workshop, the penciling of portraits, the playing of boardgames, the making of maps, a happy Pearl and a sleepy Pearl, and the curiosity of two families embarking on new adventures. The barn is made of pieces that were and are and will be. Are we so different?

A Trunnel – one of many Tree Nails securing the original structure.	Roman Numeral Marriage Marks to help builders determine what went where!

An exterior door that led to the unsurvivable drop, (that looks rather survivable from here...)	...is now our bathroom door!

The Floor Sanders – Søren, Silas, and I — unintentionally recreating The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte.	The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte

A satisfying before and after! We first rented this Drum Floor Sander and used 60 grit sandpaper, then used this Orbital Sander with 80 and 100 grit.	Finishing the new floor with Citrus Solvent and Tung Oil from The Real Milk Paint Company. We use this natural finish on Peg and Awl treasures too!

Pearl enjoying the new space from her favourite rug – a flea market find!	We painted the floor white! Søren tries out the new staircase that he helped install,

Original wall that divides the two parts of the barn. Pearl and Søren, my loves.	Walter used the saw mill to make doors out of the American Chestnut trunks!

American Chestnut Tree beams born in the 1700s leave their lowly position of being walked upon + now usher in light, people, and animals!	Walter’s gorgeous first go at door building!