Great Finds & Finished Quilts - Hooray!

I love yard/garage sales! This morning, as I was driving home from the store, I passed a yard sale and had to stop and see what they had. They had some pretty neat things! I purchased these:
A great white pitcher (doesn't it look great with the sunflowers I picked from the field by our house!), a white soup tureen, a rooster for my kitchen, an old yellow milk glass bottle, and an old butter cover shaped like a pig. My mom collects pigs, so I bought that for her (surprise, Mom!). I also bought an iron bucket with fake eggs in it, an iron basket to hang on my fence to hold some flowers, and a mini ironing board (which, ironically, has the cover identical to my regular-sized ironing board!)

I have also finished binding some of my quilts---hooray! This nine-patch was done in civil war reproduction fabrics. It was a block exchange with a quilting group that I'm in. Rick made the bench a few summers ago...it's timber-framed, so there is not a single nail in the construction holding it together...just wood. I love how the stain has weathered over the years.

I also finished this bullseye quilt - or as my mom calls it 'the circles'. This quilt is my mom's favorite, and it's finally finished! I left the edges of the circles raw so that it will fray with washings and add another level of dimension to the quilt.This one was the first group exchange quilt that I did (but not my first quilt in general), which was about 3 years ago...see how much I really don't like binding...I put binding off all the time! The pattern is shoo-fly and I love that it is scrappy. I think that scrappy quilts are my favorite kind of quilt. It has needed a binding for a LONG time now, but not anymore...it's done! This quilt is Rick's favorite...he says that with all of the colors it reminds him of the summer we went to Sweden to see my mom's side of the family. My mom is from Sweden and all of the rest of her family still lives there. My mom has had a pretty interesting life...she writes about it on her blog (My Swede Life)...you should check it out!Rick has been weeding the gardens this morning...such a hard worker. I would like to spend the rest of the day making grape jelly and maybe some apricot jam. A friend of mine let me come and pick some of their apricots, but a lot of them had been picked over by the birds, so I didn't get as many as I would have liked...hopefully I'll have enough for some jam. We also have a 5th Ward reunion tonight...that should be fun. I belonged to the 5th Ward during my teenage years, so it will be nice to see some of my friends that I haven't seen for years. Reading this and wondering what a Ward is? I'm LDS - Mormon - I belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and a ward is a group of families that all live within the same boundaries that go to the same church at the same time. For more info on the LDS Church, or Mormons, you can click on the link on the sidebar. Oh, and I'd also like to get one more quilt bound this weekend...sounds like I'll have my hands full!