Carol, if you plan to drop the feed dogs for any reason, try lowering and raising the feed dogs a few times. I got this machine from HSN when it first came out a year or so ago but after lowering the feed dogs a few times, the latch wouldn't raise them anymore. I could manually push the feed dogs up with my fingers and they would click and stay up, but the lever wouldn't work so I returned it and got my money back. I'm sure I just had a bit of a lemon, but since that happened to me I thought I'd pass the info on. Enjoy your new machine!
Suzy