HEY! I’m Jenny Ostlund-Evens and I am Braided Stream Arts. Welcome to my new website! I’m excited that you are here and hope you enjoy checking out all of the things that make me feel happy and fulfilled.

A little bit about me and why I chose the name Braided Stream Arts for my business name. A braided stream has multi-threaded channels that branch and merge, continuously reforming as they flow. I am a nature loving artist and feel that my art also consists of multi-threaded channels of many different mediums with underlying themes and traits that merge as they flow through my thoughts and hands. I have been a memorial artist in central Minnesota since 1987. Most of that art consists of creating finely detailed pen and ink drawings for customized personal monuments and Veterans Memorials. I also do freelance portraits and portrait collages in black pencil. I paint colorful murals in children’s rooms and churches, schools, and businesses. The art that I am most passionate about is typically nature inspired. I design nature-inspired essential oil diffusing jewelry, stained-glass mosaics and love to hit the great outdoors with my camera to capture and share the natural beauty that is all around us. Recently I have taken up Swedish Kurbits painting and am really enjoying this new medium! (My husband has told me that I cannot have any more hobbies because we are trying to “downsize” as we head into retirement, lol.)

Something I am extremely thrilled about is that I have recently become an author. This is something I have talked about for the last 45 years! My grandfather, John Ostlund, was a Swedish Immigrant to Minnesota in 1902. From boyhood on, he recorded his life adventures as short stories in his diary. They were originally written in Swedish, but his hope was that future generations would find his experiences interesting, so he translated them into English once he was fluent. He died one month after I was born, so I didn’t have the opportunity to get to know him as a grandfather. However, I still grew to know and love him through his stories and have always felt a strong connection to him. Thus, as a teenager, I vowed to someday honor his memory by publishing his memoirs, not just for family, but for other Swedish Americans or anyone who has a relative that immigrated to America or is curious about what that experience and time was like. The stories cover his life as a child in Sweden, growing and working there, deciding to emigrate to America and that journey, his adventures establishing himself here, homesteading, working as a lumberjack, a locomotive engineer, a farmer, a public servant, etc. They include his adventures as a pioneer in northern Minnesota and other wilderness and life experiences, becoming a husband and father, visiting his homeland of Sweden and bringing family back to America, as well as coping with the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II.

I look forward to sharing my outdoor adventures, art, and thoughts on a regular basis, so be sure to check in now and then.