Sunday 28 December 2014

Which Sewing Machine For Me?

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 :