Janome Memory Craft 6600P

Hello, gorgeous.

Meet my new best friend, the Janome Memory Craft 6600. She doesn’t have a name yet, feel free to leave suggestions. Gotta think of a good one, as I suspect she and I are going to be together for a long, long time.

I’ve been checking out this machine ever since Dana gave one away as part of the original ORBCo quilt-along, nearly a year ago.  But it felt out of my league. Way more than I needed.  My still-pretty-new Janome was working fine.  Of course, I started sewing more and more, and the minor shortcomings of my machine became more annoying. More than anything, I wanted something a little more hefty and solid, and a bigger throat for cramming big quilts.

And, then, Amy got hers.  She was kind enough to email back & forth with me, telling me what she thought about it, where she got it, etc.  Our husbands apparently are of the same school of thought: “oh, just stop talking about it and get it already!”  They’re good ones, the both of ‘em.  And then I found out my local shop not only didn’t have any in stock, but was selling it for $200 less than where she got hers…  so off I drove.

I love it.  It’s big and heavy, and feels really solid.  The needle motion is smooth, it’s reasonably quiet.  I’m quickly coming to love the knee-lift bar, which is perfect when you’re chain-piecing (which I do as often as humanly possible).  The extra couple of inches in the throat makes a huge difference when working on a quilt of any real size.

The Accu-Feed foot is the bomb-fricking-diggity.  So much smoother than my old walking foot, easy to adjust if you find the top isn’t feeding evenly enough with the bottom.  And SO quiet. I don’t know about you, but my old walking foot was like old train tracks. All clackety-clack and after an hour or so, I worried something was just going to snap right off.  So loud and clunky, I was completely stressed every time I use it because my sewing space shares a wall with my kids’ room, and I’ll be damned if I was going to wake them up too early from a nap.  This one? No problem.  Smooth, straight, quiet. While straight-line quilting is still tedious, this makes it much less of a chore.

I tried a little free-motion in the store, and noticed an enormous improvement in my tension when I switched to a Janome bobbin case specifically for FMQ (I think it lessens the bobbin tension by 40% or something). I’ll give you the full low-down when I do a real quilt that way.

One of my favorite bells & whistles is the Start/Stop button.  I loved it doing long, straight quilting lines, and I think I’m REALLY going to love it for free-motion.  Taking my foot out of the equation just means one less thing to think about. It’s a bigger perk than I might have imagined, and while I initially panicked about hitting “stop” at the right time, it quickly became a pretty natural motion.  Very conveniently located.

Also, the thread-cutter rocks.  A little noisier than I expected it to be, but awesome for those times when you are trying to lift up a big quilt to try and find that bobbin thread to snip, without actually cutting a hole in your quilt.

Now, all I need is to find an excuse to use even half of those decorative stitches.

I’ve had it almost two weeks now, and while I may feel a twinge of guilt at the excess of it all, I have zero buyer’s remorse.  I’ll keep you all posted as I get to really put it through its paces, but so far, two thumbs up.