I love my decorative stitches available on my machine. I dress up clothes, especially for kids, all the time! I love to use them on my quilts. It adds that special "WOW" affect. Once I take a scrap and experience how it stitches out, I'm off and away! Use those stitches! A person can get very creative with the simplest stitches also. Try combining them also.

I love to use the decorative stitches on my Bernina when machine quilting my Linus quilts. It gives a little extra flare and like someone else mentioned in makes quilting in the ditch much more accurate. I also believe it helps hold the piecing together. I like to use varigated quilting thread as it also looks more decorative. I use a walking foot if I am quilting. The decorative stitches really dress up any sewing project. We have those small memory foam pillows on our bed. I made pillowcases for them as the queen size ones that came with my sheets are way to big. I used a decorative stitch about 4 inches in from the opening just to make the pillowcases look a little special.
For anyone who wants to participate in the " one million pillowcase project" you could decorate a store bought pillow case with embroidery, decorative stitches or some appliqued motifs etc. I do something like that for my grandchildren and great nieces and nephews for special occasions.

I use some of my decorative stitches - the more open/less dense ones to sew on my binding as I don't do hand work anymore.

I use the dec stitches [again, the less dense stitching ones] a LOT in bobbin work: where you put prettier and thicker threads in the bobbin for a great look. You just sew 'upside down' in that the bottom is up when you do this technique. Looks really WOW with something like a Razzle Dazzle thread.

I stitched about samples of all the decorative stitches on my machine onto 8.5x11" sheets of fabric and I marked next to them which stitches they are. You can fit a lot of these onto a single sheet. Now when I want to use them for a project I just look in these reference sheets until I find something suitable. Of course, the size of the stitching can still be varied, but it is useful to have it available like this, rather than to just try to figure out what it will look like when it's sewn.

This is a great idea Carol. The tiny picture of the decorative stitches usually don't do them justice and they look so much better stitched out.

I'm going to do this..thank you. :roll: :roll: :roll:

I have 5 machines, the 2 I use the most are my Janome 8077 from Hancocks, it has pretty stitches, and my Janome 1600 P-QC, from dealer, it is a fast traight stitch machine. I use the 1600 for piecing and FMQ. And I use the 8077 for decorative stitching and piecing.

I use the decorative stitching on my machine to quilt the few quilts that I have quilted so far.

very pretty. thank you for sharing.

I use my decorative stitches a lot. They are especially useful for applique. In addition to the decorative stitches, there are some utility stitches that are included with the pretty ones. One of my stitches is two stitches forward and one back, which does well for embroidering lines on applique pieces. The longer I have my machine, the more I use the decorative stitches. You could probably get by without them, but I'm glad I have them. More than I thought I would be.

if the Juki has a bigger throat space I would definitely get that. I have a machine with lots of stitches and so far mostly use the straight stitch. You could always get another embroidery machine if you decide you want to do decorative stitches..If I had my choice over again i would get a workhorse one that will sew over anything and would be quite happy if it only sewed straight stitches.