My husband is a quilter too and he pieced a beautiful quilt that he asked the local LA person to finish for him, it was a fabulous job of quilting but totally took away from the quilt design. All you see when you look at the quilt is the quilting and not the piecing. We both feel that the two components should complement each other. We also wanted to be able to fully complete out projects ourselves. We spent about 6 months looking around and checking out machines and finally bought one (HQ Avante) last November. We now do classes for customers to learn how to operate the machine and they can then rent time on her to complete their own projects. We will never make a fortune but we hope we are passing on skills, enthusiasm and opportunity to other quilters for a reasonable cost so that they too can fully complete their projects.