Originally Posted by mama's place

I have a suggestion for you....try FMQ on a Juki or a Mega Quilter that is made by Husqvarna and is around $900....Juki is $700 new. Without a frame you can do the FMQ much more easily than on a machine that does the fancy stitches. These two machines do straight stitch only and once you drop the feed dogs, you can do loops, etc. without much difficulty. I know, I tried on my Kenmore, that is made I believe by Janome and does really nice fancy stitches at a bargain price but my FMQ attempts looked okay on top but the bobbin stitches were never right no matter what I did. One try on the Juki 98 and I was doing FMQ after all that time of practicing and fretting...I was off and running. So for the money, you can get one of those and practice and work without a frame or add a frame later. I'm thinking of doing that. And I see that Janome has a new Horizon that has a longer throat area and it isn't tooooo expensive....I think in the $2,000 plus range. So that's a long way from the $9,000 plus range of some of those machines.....Just a suggestion. I ordered my Juki from a SewNVac dealer online with a money back guarantee and didn't have to pay shipping either.