sewingpup

well....I am spoiled and have spent far to much on new machines over the years.....I too have an old Viking D1...which was top of the ine when I bought it....I did a ton of embroidery on it, made quilts, made draperies...that thing did everything plus had a decent straight stitch...unfortunately, when one of the boards go out on it now...it is toast, they don't make them anymore...it even has a floppy drive for the embroidery disks....I agree...basically what you need to quilt....is a nice straight stitch....you can cover the feed dogs if they do not drop....and that is what you need....however, I am totally spoiled by the D1 and just bought myself a Bernina 570 ( the new one for some reason Bernina gives some new machines old numbers....) Anyway...the Bernina has a larger throat, needle up/down..I can tell it to always stop with the needle down, I set the presser foot for "hover" so I can easily turn the fabric when I stop stitching as the hover automatically raises the presser foot just a little, has a thread cutter, has a drop down walking foot, came with a stitch regulator for free motion quilting, has a larger bobbin, has videos that show on the screen to do things like wind a bobbin, thread the machine, clean it, and oil it (just the bobbin race) and it has a serpentine stitch which I can modify when I machine stitch my binding down. Also has the capability to do embroidery which I haven't tried yet on this machine but have lots of designs it can use in my stash....and it has a wonderful blanket stitch for appliques amoung a lot of other stitches....like I will be lucky if I use 5% of the stitches....I also bought a little Bernina 215 to take to classes.....or whatever....I had a gem gold which I used to use but gave that one to my nephew as it lacked the ability to modify stitch length and only had three.....I think with the more complicated machines....they really are sewing computers and have a definite life spam before you have to replace them...just like smart phones and computers.....