Hi everyone!
I hope that this is a topic that has not been talked to death on this board.. I've found a lot of threads about the hopping foot on the Juki TL series machines, but not really much mention of my particular issue..
I had been learning to FMQ on my Janome with a floating foot and doing great, and I decided to get a Juki TL-2200 QVP mini (pretty much a TL-2010) for the larger harp space. It's such a nice machine, but free motion quilting on it has been a trial.
First, I tried the hopping foot. I did not like it. So, I modified the hopping foot following Leah Day's instructions. Perfect! Except that using this foot is where my problems with skipped stitches and thread breakage began. I decided to buy the Janome free motion foot set that fits this machine. It was brilliant! Except that I still had thread breakage. I adjusted the tension and switched from Mettler to Aurifil, and my problems got a little better... but they're still there. Sometimes I sit down to quilt and the tension still doesn't seem quite right, or the thread will break occasionally.
So tonight I decided to sit down with the hopping foot. (This was originally brought on by machine envy- I was watching a review of Leah Day's Juki TL-2200 long arm sit down machine and she mentioned only being able to use a hopping foot with it and having to get used to it. So I thought, maybe I should just get used to my hopping foot so someday when I get a long arm I'm used to it!) My tension looked great and I had no thread breakage problems. Am I doing something wrong with my non-hopping feet, or does my machine just work better with the hopping foot and I need to just get used to it? Has anyone else had this experience?
Another question - I've noticed with the hopping foot that it kind of grips the quilt sandwich between the foot and the machine bed. It takes more pulling to move the quilt than it does with the floating foot. I think this is what I find most frustrating about the hopping foot - it's harder to move the quilt. Is this just the way the hopping foot works? Would it be helped by a supreme slider so that my quilt doesn't catch on the slots where the feed dogs are?
tl;dr - my machine likes the hopping foot better, do I just need to suck it up and learn to love it?
Thanks for reading my essay!
-Cheryl