Finish #23

 I'm sure you are sick of seeing double four patches by now, but I made a lot of them while trying to bust a ridiculous number of 2" cut scrap squares. By using leftover wideback strips for the alternating squares, it's a really easy way to bust a lot of scraps at once. 

This one busted a bunch of patriotic scraps. I had just enough length of the red and blue for the backing, but it wasn't wide enough, so again, I just looked through my under 1 yard pieces and made something work. It's finish #23 for the year, all of which were UFO's. 

This was the last quilt I had basted. Since I lost my chance at a big basting spree in the living room, I'm having to baste on my cutting table. My cutting table is pretty big, and it's a great height for basting. The reason I wanted to keep my cutting table open was so that I could use it to cut the pieces for backings and also the other quilts for DD#1's family. Two of the quilt tops I had made for DD#1's family were done, and I was just backing with minky that didn't need to be pieced, so I got those basted. I also pieced a backing for another quilt top, and got that one basted. I won't get the basting spree done as quickly this way, because I keep needing the cutting table, but I've got a pile of three basted quilts now, and eventually that pile will grow. I decided I'm going to finish up the table runners I had basted before starting to quilt a new quilt. I think I have six table runners basted? Well, I finished quilting two of those this week, so technically four now. I need to sew the binding on those two before I go to another one. I could use the same thread on both, so I just quilted those two up, and now I'll bind both before moving on to one that requires a different color of thread. 

Speaking of thread, One of the things that was bugging me about the Bernina 735, was the fact  had to use a freestanding thread stand to use cones. I have no problems using a thread stand when I'm piecing, because nothing really ever goes to the right hand of my machine when piecing, but when I am quilting a quilt of any size, the quilt often hits the thread stand and screws up the way the thread feeds. Since my Janome M7 had a built in cone holder I never had to worry about it. I looked to see if Bernina had an attachment that would work, and they have a multi spool holder you can attach, but it's much larger than I need, and almost $200! It's mostly for people who embroider with their machines, and it would be worth it for that, but I have no interest in embroidering on a machine.

I went to etsy and found this. I bought it and I am so glad I did!

Here it is on the back of my machine, and you can see that there is plenty of room for the quilt to go under the spool holder, and the spool holder can hold big cones. I think the white cone has 6,000 yards of thread on it, and it fits just fine. You can also see which table runners I was working on! There is a video on his etsy listing on how it goes on, and it screws on very easily into screw holes already on the machine. Solving something that was bugging me on this machine is a win! I really wish we could custom order a machine that had all the things we want on it, at this point in my sewing journey, I have some specific preferences, but I've never found one machine with everything I want, at any price.