Repair of sewing machines doesn't really seem to become difficult - I never had trouble with my Elna anyway, and it certainly hadn't been sold in a very long time by the time I gave it up. Furthermore I regularly saw obviously far older machines than that sitting on the repair counter at the sewing machine dealer whenever I'd bring one of mine in. Unless we're actually talking a machine from before the age of electric appliances (and I doubt you'll be the type for acquiring truly antique machines as a hobby), it'll probably be just fine.
Brother/Babylock are excellent brands for quality and performance; Viking made my first embroidery machine (which, while no longer capable of doing embroidery, I still have it for regular sewing since it still does that like a champ) but their quality has started to slip some in recent years, much to my sorrow. They're still not bad by any means, but Babylock/Brother is better. I know nothing about Janome's embroidery options, but their regular sewing machine that I have fantastic. (Viking and Pfaff, btw, are owned by the same company now and you may get people trying to tell you their machines are equivalent - don't believe them, Pfaff machines suck. :P)
However, Viking still beats Babylock in one big way as far as my needs are concerned - hoops. Viking has more options, hoops that are easier to use (endless hoop is the best thing EVER, especially for test runs) and bigger potential hoop sizes, which means bigger possible embroidery designs - up to almost 14"x14" which no Babylock machine short of the Enterprise (which is really a machine for embroidery businesses, and does NOT do regular sewing) can match. Now, honestly you may not find yourself needing big embroidery options - not everyone does - but it's worth doing some serious thinking about what sort of embroidery you're really most wanting to do. I needed those giant hoops more than once, from my wedding dress to multiple costumes, and the endless hoop for borders again came in handy a LOT.
But whatever machine you buy, if you get one that does embroidery - make sure it has the ability to do custom designs somehow. USB connection to a computer/flashdrive is ideal, funky card readers and other things do become obsolete much more than other parts. You may not think you'll need anything but premade designs when you start, but trust me, it's better to have the choice than not. If nothing else, you might end up wanting to edit some parts of premade designs together - a butterfly from one and a rose from another or something - and being able to do that is a much more advanced (and useful, to me anyway, I did basically EVERYTHING custom and I think I have never once yet used a premade design) functionality. Any machine that can run custom designs well can do premade just fine - but the reverse is not necessarily true.
(I also basically never ended up using any of the "fun" decorative stitches that sometimes make up seemingly the entirety of the price difference between some models - they're not really useful for costume construction - but again, YMMV!)
As a final note, there is a marked difference sometimes in how the stitches will look - when I started running patches it was on my Pfaff, and when I traded it in for the Enterprise and ran the exact same design, the difference in stitch quality was just night and day. The Enterprise's stitches were tighter, cleaner and just looked incredibly professional next to the Pfaff's - and that Pfaff was NOT a low-end machine! If you can get samples of the kind of work your top choices will run, it's very telling sometimes to look at how the embroidery comes out - they're really not all the same, even with the exact same embroidery file.
Aaaand I'll stop now because this is already practically an essay - but if you want to talk embroidery machines sometime I'm happy to chat on the phone and share what I've learned (the hard way, mostly) over the last few years. :)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-07-20 07:13 pm (UTC)Brother/Babylock are excellent brands for quality and performance; Viking made my first embroidery machine (which, while no longer capable of doing embroidery, I still have it for regular sewing since it still does that like a champ) but their quality has started to slip some in recent years, much to my sorrow. They're still not bad by any means, but Babylock/Brother is better. I know nothing about Janome's embroidery options, but their regular sewing machine that I have fantastic. (Viking and Pfaff, btw, are owned by the same company now and you may get people trying to tell you their machines are equivalent - don't believe them, Pfaff machines suck. :P)
However, Viking still beats Babylock in one big way as far as my needs are concerned - hoops. Viking has more options, hoops that are easier to use (endless hoop is the best thing EVER, especially for test runs) and bigger potential hoop sizes, which means bigger possible embroidery designs - up to almost 14"x14" which no Babylock machine short of the Enterprise (which is really a machine for embroidery businesses, and does NOT do regular sewing) can match. Now, honestly you may not find yourself needing big embroidery options - not everyone does - but it's worth doing some serious thinking about what sort of embroidery you're really most wanting to do. I needed those giant hoops more than once, from my wedding dress to multiple costumes, and the endless hoop for borders again came in handy a LOT.
But whatever machine you buy, if you get one that does embroidery - make sure it has the ability to do custom designs somehow. USB connection to a computer/flashdrive is ideal, funky card readers and other things do become obsolete much more than other parts. You may not think you'll need anything but premade designs when you start, but trust me, it's better to have the choice than not. If nothing else, you might end up wanting to edit some parts of premade designs together - a butterfly from one and a rose from another or something - and being able to do that is a much more advanced (and useful, to me anyway, I did basically EVERYTHING custom and I think I have never once yet used a premade design) functionality. Any machine that can run custom designs well can do premade just fine - but the reverse is not necessarily true.
(I also basically never ended up using any of the "fun" decorative stitches that sometimes make up seemingly the entirety of the price difference between some models - they're not really useful for costume construction - but again, YMMV!)
As a final note, there is a marked difference sometimes in how the stitches will look - when I started running patches it was on my Pfaff, and when I traded it in for the Enterprise and ran the exact same design, the difference in stitch quality was just night and day. The Enterprise's stitches were tighter, cleaner and just looked incredibly professional next to the Pfaff's - and that Pfaff was NOT a low-end machine! If you can get samples of the kind of work your top choices will run, it's very telling sometimes to look at how the embroidery comes out - they're really not all the same, even with the exact same embroidery file.
Aaaand I'll stop now because this is already practically an essay - but if you want to talk embroidery machines sometime I'm happy to chat on the phone and share what I've learned (the hard way, mostly) over the last few years. :)