My old sewing machine has been hanging on...handling all the sewing basics for most of what I dream up. It is almost ten years old now, I guess a bit of a dinosaur in machine time. It was a wonderful buy from Costco on-line for $79 and I was impressed when it landed at my door four days after I ordered it. It was the most basic of Brother sewing machines but that was all I was interested in at the time. Hubby, being the believer in having good and correct tools, has been wanting me to buy a new one.
So began the sewing machine search.
First I had to finalize what exactly I would want a new sewing machine to do for me, more than what my little Brother can already do. My answer was free motion quilting. To complete quilts and quilt them properly I needed a machine that had the capacity to handle larger sizes of material and could change the presser foot and drop the feed dogs. That was basically it. I really had no interest in hundreds of stitches, decorative or otherwise, but who knows...you can't miss what you've never had.
Anyway, I narrowed my search down to three machines and read all the forums and readers comments I could find about them. The contest was between the Bernin550 QE which led the race for awhile, the Janome 720 and the Singer 9960 Quantum Stylist. I was a bit in love with the Bernina because aren't they the Rolls Royce of sewing machines. Swiss made just has to be better! I was completely taken with the description of the stitch regulator feature for free motion quilting that guaranteed even novice quilters wonderful results. What I was not taken with was the price, just short of $5000.00...yikes.
Janome also enjoys a wonderful reputation in the sewing machine world. The 720 was in my price range and had several review videos on Youtube that highlighted what a great machine it is. A built-in needle threader is a great invention especially for older eyes like mine. Because of its lightness and small size, it seemed to be aimed at using it for travel, to classes or such. Something I know I wouldn't require so it fell by the wayside.
I daydreamed briefly of really going for it...buying the smallest of the long arm machines and getting serious about this quilting business. But I just couldn't justify the even higher price; as you know quilting is just one of my favourite past times so it's not like I'm quilting all the time.
As I said the Singer 9960 Quantum Stylist was on my short list and one day while searching on-line, it popped up on Amazon ( how they are tracking our on-line searches is a little scary!) being offered at half the regular price, considerably cheaper than I could buy it in Canada.
Time to take the leap, I thought.
No comments :
Post a Comment