The Green Door

Antiquing in Shakespeare

My latest vintage purchase... these shutters in an amazing shade of blue-green.

There is a hamlet just down the road from Stratford with the apt name of Shakespeare. In this quaint hamlet there is a small conglomeration of antique stores. And in a shop called Land & Ross Antiques, I found these wonderful shutters.

You can see a collection of these shutters leaning against the wall behind the white van in the middle photo. I came across them there but didn't buy any just then. That night, after seeing Twelfth Night at the Stratford Festival, I lay awake thinking about them and plotting what I might be able to do with them... for their lovely blue-greeness was calling to me.

By morning I knew that I wanted to bring a pair home with me and my dear patient husband agreed to return to take another look. And so we did. To top things off, I managed to get a wee deal. The sign said $45 each, those slightly damaged $15 each. I got the pair for $25.

I'll show you what I do with them in a future blog entry!

A Lovely Delight

Imagine coming home from work only to find a beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers like this one at your door? Well, that is exactly what happened to me today. Dear L. next door, who is graduating from a floral design program, surprised me with this gorgeous "pompadour" style bouquet. Isn't it a vision? It's lovely delights such as this one, that come upon us unexpectedly, that make life so special.

Rescue Mission

While gathering flat rocks from the garden of a friend of mine to complete a little corner in my backyard, I noticed this wee table under a tree towards the back of her garden. “Why is that table out in the elements?” I asked, “Are you hoping the paint will peel off?”

To which she replied that no, she wasn’t trying to do anything with it. She had just left it out there and did I want it? Well, you can imagine my response. Already I was thinking of all the possibilities of how one could use a little table like that! So, after I’d loaded up the back of the van with layers and layers of flat rocks and a few pots of various ground cover, I spread a garbage bag across the back seat and placed the table upside down, securing it with seat belts before heading on my way.

Once home, I placed it on the patio in our backyard to give it a closer look and beamed at my treasure. It seems a shame to have to scrape away all the peeling paint because it is a very pretty shade of green. What I didn’t realize when I saw it in the woody area of my friend’s garden (because the legs were stuck in the earth) is that the bottom portion of the legs have already started to rot away and though you wouldn’t know it from the photos, it is leaning very badly to the right. I will have to cut the bottoms of the legs a little to even everything out.

The weather has done quite a lot of damage, so I am hoping that with some work I will be able to rescue it. Restoring it for use wil be such a fun project. Stay tuned for the results!

Spring Green

We’re at that stage in spring when the buds on the trees are poised to burst forth. The bright light green of these buds, just before they unfurl, is such a lovely fresh shade. And if you’re not careful, a moment of distraction can cause you to miss the moment altogether. It seems that in a blink of an eye the spring buds unfurl into leaves and the time to notice is gone for yet another year. So stop and take a look while you can, enjoy this brief encounter.

Wikipedia says that spring green is the colour on the colour wheel “that is precisely halfway between cyan and green” and that the complementary colour of spring green is rose. It also reports that the “first recorded use of spring green as a color name in English was in 1766.”

But I think that spring green is more like the Crayola crayon that’s labeled “green-yellow,” created in 1949.