Moving mother and a couple of thrift store finds

The last couple of weeks have been me helping to get my mother's things packed so she could move to town. It's a long story but we wanted her closer so we could respond to there strange and frantic calls. We found her a nice little 2 bedroom place in a retirement community close to everyone else but me. How did I get so lucky, I don't even get a spare key. Any way while cleaning out my dad's desk I came across 4 envelopes with the kids names and their birth year. My father was collecting the money from the year of each of our births. I was actually born in 1962. Oh well I have all the coins from 1963. 
After packing so much of my mothers stuff I decide to drop off some of the stuff at a thrift store. So of course I had to go in. I found this lovely aqua, green and grey quilt top. When I brought it home I thought my husband would be mad that I was bring home more crap from my mothers (I have 3 bags of paperwork from the early 80's). When he saw the quilt top he asked for it to be a curtain for the back room...Oh yea, why yes it can. I love all the bright colors and the fussy cuts for the mermaids, birds and butterflies. All I have to do it back it and I have a new curtain for the back room, if I line it like a quilt it will help keep the draft down. I think I win either way. 
The other thing I have been looking for at thrift stores are needle points. I want to make a small bag using a needle point like the one I saw here.  I use to see needle points all the time but now that I actually want to use one to make something they are difficult to locate. I need ones that has tight stitching so things will not snag the yarn and break it. I found the above needle points recently, the top one was in a free pile next door. It was framed, when I unframed it I found the original tag for, I believe, the piece before it was stitch, the pattern was made in Israel. The second one was found at the goodwill bins in a stack of frames. I took the needle point out of the frame and left the frame. It's a very Thomas Kincade type of illustration. Not my favorite but it's a good piece to use as practice and I think it cost me about $1.  
The place my mother moved into has west facing windows and gets a really nice amount of light. We hope it will also keep her warm. She is always cold, no matter how high the heat is in the house. We also provided her with several warm lap blankets.

Jam & some Churn Dash Blocks

When all of our guest had left we found that we had a lot of cherries left over from their visit. I like cherries but there was a lot of cherries left at the house so I decided to make some jam. I also had some strawberries so I added those to the mix. A friend had given me some funky scissors last summer that she was using to chop herbs. I was able to use these scissors to cut up the cherries for the jam. I used my FreshTech Jam Machine and came up with 4 half pints + of Cherry, Strawberry Vanilla Jam (I gave away one of the half pints before I was able to take a photo). I think it used a little  too much vanilla in the jam, I used 2 vanilla beans and really I should have used only one. Then luck struck again...my neighbor Jessie pointed out a Golden Raspberry batch in the community garden (I thought it was just a bush of unripe raspberries), it was FULL of ripe raspberries. I picked a lot to make jam, but ended up eating some so I did not get as much jam as I had hoped. The golden raspberries if you have never had them are wonderful. They have a very fresh raspberry taste and are oh so sweet. The only down side that I found in the golden raspberries is they seem to have more seeds then red raspberries. I strain about 1/2 of the raspberries when I make jam so I don't get a seed filled jam. I think I strained about 3/4 of the golden raspberries before I made the jam. I had to add about a pint of red's to this jam to get the 3 cups needed to make the jam in my FreshTech machine. I think the red's helped make the jam a lovely golden rose color. I also added 1/2 a vanilla bean, this gave the jam a lovely flavor.    
I have been working on the churn dash quilt block. I have seen the block in older quilts and it seems to be on a lot of quilting blogs lately. So I decided to take a stab at making a churn dash block. I messed with different ways to use the squares and I really like making a red cross on the center. I think I will make a few more and see what they look like mixed together. It's a fun block but a little fussy which is not my style of quilting. I'm a pretty messy quilter...I hate having to match up points. This block really needs the points to match....so I may only make this as a test to see if I can do it.