I had another long-weekend this weekend. Mom had to have some pretty intense surgery on Friday, so I came down so Dad could hang about the hospital without worrying about the dogs. I’m happy to say the surgery, while long, went really well. She’ll probably be in the hospital for a week, and have to take it easy for a while as she heals, but she’s got us for support.

I, of course, took advantage of the time to do a little quilting, and such and I’ll share more throughout the week, but today I want to share how I finished off the weekend.

You may remember my little adventure to a place called Grasshopper Imports a couple years ago. It was 2018, and I’ve always meant to go back. They are only open for the spring/summer. I didn’t have any money in 2019. 2020 was of course COVID lockdowns, and last year we were far too busy with house buying/moving. But Krista and I promised each other, 2022 would be the year we would go back.

Then a couple weeks ago, I saw and announcement on Facebook – after 30 years in business, they were closing for good! They would only be open for a couple more weeks to sell off the remaining stock. We were so upset.

So, as soon as I found out I’d be down for the weekend, I asked her if she wanted to make some time to hit the place up one last time. Yesterday we did. Sadly, by the time we got there, there wasn’t much left. Mostly some plain pots – certainly none of the whimsical planters and statuary they are known for.

I did manage to find these cute little hooks:

The ants will go on the side of the shed, so I can have a few tools handy. The lady bug will probably go somewhere in the catio.

We took one last selfie with the famous wall

and headed down the road to Terra to console ourselves. If we couldn’t buy fun planters, we’d buy plants!!!!

From left to right: Earth Star, Dragon Fingers, Lifesaver cactus, Panda plant, miniature inch-plants, some sort of spiky aloe, and an unknown brown spiky succulent.

I really only planned to get the Lifesaver cactus. It doesn’t look like much right now, but one day, if I treat it right, it will have flowers like this!!!

How cool is that???

As for the other plants… I do have a Panda plant, but it’s more of a blue-green, not that pretty copper brown. The Dragon Fingers were on clearance, and you know I can’t resist a clearance plant!

The mini inch plant was OBVIOUSLY meant for my fancy pigeon planter.

The Earth Star… I mean, just look at it…could you leave that behind???

The tiny spiky aloe was just the right size for this tiny Burton planter I had.

And the unknown succulent was ideal for this mug Krista gave me. The mug was too cute to tuck away in a cupboard. I think a planter is a much better use for it!

So while our last blast as Grasshopper turned out to be a bit of a bust, we ended up alright in the end!

Several weeks have gone by and I am happy to report, my indoor seed experiment is going quite nicely

Some of the seeds are definitely doing better than others, but almost everything sprouted.

The black-eyed susans, shasta daisies, blanket flower and lupins are the most robust. There’s still no signs of life from the seeds I’d brought from the townhouse gardens. Of the store boughts seeds, only the Astilbe didn’t sprout. Though they may still do so – I’ve read that they can take a little longer than other seeds.

Patience is definitely the key when starting from seed!

And patience pays off elsewhere too. The snow melted and things warmed up and…

I have a DAFFODIL!!!!! If you look closely, you’ll notice the Lupin leaves in behind it. It’s not in the bulb box. At first, I thought it was a leftover present from the previous owners (in addition to the grape hyacinths taking over the catio, there are a few tulips popping up around the foundation of the house), but on further contemplation, I think this one came from the town house. It’s likely the bulb was tucked in with the Lupin roots. Since I pulled everything up with as much dirt as possible, I wouldn’t have noticed it. It’s most likely one of my mini-daffies that I planted a couple years ago. Regardless – it’s a very welcome sight!

Easter Sunday, I didn’t sleep in, but got up early, and piled Dave into the truck and headed out. We had a destination!

When I’d bought the rattan lounger, the lady I bought it from told me about Brickyard Antiques. In addition to the store front in Petrolia, she also has a booth in this place. It was only half an hour from our house, so I thought it would be a fun Easter Sunday outing.

And boy was it.

The place was even bigger than it looked from the outside, with booth after booth of weird and wonderful stuff. There were all the usual knick knacks and glassware and things you find at places like this but also…

Random signs… who decided to hang on to something like that?

Then there were some original works of art…

…Bob Ross a la Lucasfilm? I’m not really sure.

And they really do have a Barbie Doll for everything

Not just Campbell’s soup… but Alphabet Soup specifically. I wonder if there’s a Chicken Noodle version?

What really caught my eye were these two items:

My Grandfather had a Texaco gas station for many, many years, so Dad and I are always on the look-out for Texaco memorabilia. We usually find signs and old cans/boxes. These two pieces were pretty exciting. Sadly, at $240 for the truck, and $120 for the hat, they were out of my budget so they are still at the market.

I did find a nice little reproduction sign which he doesn’t have in his collection already. It was in the budget, so it came home with me

My real prize, however was these:

In case you’re not familiar, these are Blow-Mold Christmas decorations. I believe they were quite popular through the ’50-70s. Apparently some were made right up to 2017, though I’ve never seen any modern ones. Dad has a small collection, and he puts them out proudly every Christmas.

Like many “vintage” items, they’ve gotten pricier and pricier as the years have gone by. These three, however, were a pretty good deal so I snapped them up. I’m going to tuck them (and the sign) away until Father’s Day.

Dave didn’t come home empty handed either…

He found an old tube amp to tinker with. It doesn’t look like much to me, but he was pretty darn excited about it so it must be special somehow!

Inside…

Or outside…

He’s just a belly-up kind of cat…

Not a quilt block…

But a cardigan block… well… blocking…

Little Pearl is off the needles and on the blocking board. And I’m quite pleased with it. I think the yarn makes it a nice, gender-neutral, autumn-themed cardigan any new Mom would be thrilled with.

Now, I’m doing something different with this one. I didn’t put button holes in the band. Ages ago, Mom got a kit to add snaps to bags etc, and it came with about eleventy billion different coloured snap sets. So I thought, why not put snaps on a cardigan?

I’m headed there this weekend to give it a whirl! I hope it works out as well as I think it will!

Walks continue, and I want to share a little quirk of Alvinston. At least, I think it’s a little quirky…

I mentioned before that Alvinston is a very small town – about 2,500 people. I suspect, looking at the houses and other buildings, that it was relatively prosperous until the late ’80s. Then it went the way of many small towns… the bigger cities around got the Walmarts and other big box stores, and little towns like these just died. There’s not a lot of industry out here, mostly agriculture.

But despite that… Alvinston has/had FIVE churches. Now… only two of them are still working as churches, but still that seems a lot of a town of this size, in a day and age where religious commitment is not what it once was.

Here are the two working churches.

The church on the left is a Presbyterian Church. The one on the right is the United Church of Canada. They are both quite large churches, which as I said, surprises me in a town this small.

The rest of the churches have all been converted to houses.

This one is on the main street coming into town. I don’t know if the house addition was built before or after it was converted to a residence. That addition is definitely modern. Above the main entrance, the stained glass says St. Matthew’s, and the limited research I’ve done tells me it was once a Catholic church and it closed as a church in 2007, so it’s possible the addition was built before.

The next residence was once a Baptist Church, and the little plaque at the top declares it to have been built in 1881. I couldn’t find any more information on it.

This last one, you saw a glimpse of already with the little bird church. It was called St. John’s and built in 1873, must have been the first church in Alvinston. (Evidenced also by the fact it is on Church Street). I’ve discovered it was an Anglican church, and it’s bell is now in a conservation area almost an hour south of here. It looks like the bell was moved in 1981. I’m not sure when the church stopped being a church.

I’m going to keep doing some digging. There’s a lot of history in this little town.

Before I get into this week’s stitching…

WHAT THE HELL MOTHER NATURE???? This was her Easter Monday treat for us! Now it’s supposed to be up to 18C/34F by Thursday, but I really could have done without seeing any more snow until November. I blame Dave – he siphoned the gas from the snow-blower this weekend, thinking he wouldn’t need it until next winter.

Sigh…

On to more enjoyable things…

With it being Easter weekend, I had plenty of time in the evenings to stitch away on my little Queen.

I’ve finished almost all of the flowers and vines on the right-hand side. I say almost, because there are five little stitches in the centre of that one rose that should be gold. But it seemed silly to cut a new thread for just five stitches. The left-hand side has a rose just like it, so I’ll wait until I do that one to do them both… and cut a new thread for just 10 stitches! Lol.

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve shown you any Blockhead progress, but we have two more blocks added to our collection

That brings our total to four, and both Burton and I think this quilt is looking pretty fab so far!

First, let me wish you all at Happy Easter! It’s a quiet one for us. Dave’s Grandma is back in the hospital (she fell again – nothing broken, but she’s bruised pretty good so they are keeping here there until she’s more steady). I’m hoping to get Dave out to do a little antiquing today, but it’s weather dependent.

Burton meanwhile, is having his own little Easter party, it seems…

This little carrot bag was a free pattern on Connecting Threads. I just couldn’t resist making one! I filled it full of chocolate, and will drop it off to Wren next time I’m down that way!

In the meantime, the nicer weather also naturally had me poking around the gardens, such as they are.

The bulb box had definitely made the most progress – especially the tulip section, as you can see above. It was time to get the protective screen off.

After I did that, I was able to get some pictures of this season’s very first blooms!

Pure little crocuses! I don’t have many of them, and at the townhouse, I never got to enjoy the blooms long before the buns got them. But I’m hoping to plants scads of them here. They are always such a cheerful thing to see!

Mother Nature has finally decided to slow the roller coaster, and allow us a chance to start comfortably tackling the jobs that need doing around the yard.

Back in the fall, when Dave was fixing the windows on my shed, he told me that the ground behind the shed was at least two-feet taller than the front. I figured it was just years of leaf-litter built up (In the summer, the space between the shed and back fence was impassible from Virginia Creeper vines.)

I told him I would take care of it in the spring… and boy…. am I regretting that now…

The picture does not detail the true horror of it. There’s some leaf litter, there – yes… but underneath it, there’s vines upon roots, upons vines, and MORE vines, all tangled together! But there’s also garbage… piles and piles of garbage. Not household garbage, at least, but so far, I’ve found a pile of plastic sheeting, rope and twine, chunks of old carpet, several cinder blocks, broken bits of wood and metal, and old metal plant stand (which unfortunately wasn’t salvageable), all buried under at least 30 years of composted leaves and such. I worked at it for a full afternoon and barely scratched the surface.

This was obviously the old homeowners’ dumping ground. Out of sight… out of mind kind of thing.

I’m hoping to get it all cleared out this weekend… but I told Dave, I’m not making any promises. It’s a much bigger job than I thought.

One small bright spot. I did uncover a little bit of buried treasure.

It’s to far gone to be used as a lantern ever again… but Dave’s going to clean it up and give it a paint job, and I think it will make a fabulous little garden decoration.

Fingers crossed there’s more treasures somewhere in all that dirt!