CaleyH

Since coming to quilting about six months ago, I've had nothing but lots of fun. While our hobby is time consuming and tedious, it still remains fun. Maybe it's my old age that gives me lots more patience. :-)

So far the only quilting I've done is straight lines. It's the only thing I could do with my Singer Quantum Stylist 9960, because that machines throat is just so small. I really do like the Singer. It's very easy to use, now that I've learned its little quirks.

But I really would love to try something other than straight line quilting. I've attempted free motion quilting, but I just don't have the coordination to make things look nice. I tend to be all over the place when trying to do loops and squiggles.

I am seriously looking into template/ruler quilting, but my little Singer just doesn't have the room for such. So I am trying to discover a machine that is user friendly, especially since I am so relatively new to quilting.

I've looked at the Juki TL-2000Qi, which has a throat size of about 8 inches, not too much bigger than my singer. The only thing that scares me is adjusting the tension on the Juki. I've never figured out how to adjust tension very well. I seem to tend to do things backwards, and make things worse, even when I look at a video on how it's done. I hear the Juki is a really good machine, but not sure, as a beginner, it is right for me.

There are some nice computerized machines line the Janome MC6650, but that is very expensive. It had good throat space at around 10 inches. Not sure how powerful it is, or how reliable.

I would like to find a machine with about 9+ inches of throat space, but not sure there is anything under $1000. I'm hoping the threading is fairly easy, as well as the needle threading. I could live with a mechanical machine, if I can get some help setting it up from those here on the Forums.

I was kind of hoping I could purchase this for Cyber Monday, if I can find one that is on sale.