So funny story, I bought this machine back in Sept of 2013. That was 3 years ago. I bought it with intensions of starting to learn how to sew - well that never happened. For the next 3 years, this thing sat in my storage room in its original unopened box, being used as mainly a nicely shaped heavy box that all my other crap can pile on top of. Imagine my surprise that in 2016 when I saw this pop up on amazon again, I was like "oh let's see how much it price dropped since I bought it" (note this is a really common thing w/ me, I buy stuff that I end up not using much and it price drops dramatically next time I check), and it turned out to be a good $40 MORE EXPENSIVE than when I bought it 3 years ago! O__O With most technology a 3 year gap would drop the price by hundreds - but I guess this totally doesn't apply to something like a sewing machine? In any case, I finally pulled this out and started modifying a lot of my garments that have been in the "sell to resale shops or donate" bags. I did some research ahead of time on how to use it via youtube vids, and got ideas/steps/guides from various youtubers on how to mod my existing clothes to something new. I find this machine to be pretty beginner friendly as long as you do some basic research first. The booklet explains a lot of the parts very well but I mostly just glanced through it or skipped to the specific foots that I need to look for (ie zipper foot) since I got the rest of what I need to know from youtube. This does come with a detachable foot pedal but also a start/stop button for if you don't want to use the foot pedal. I prefer the pedal as initially when I tried using the button I keep forgetting to press it when I need to stop. foot pedal, even for beginners, is much more intuitive. There's a speed control slider which lets you adjust the speed no matter how hard you press, which is suuuuuuper nice for beginner. At the lowest speed I find the machine to be not very noisy, but recently I changed it to medium speed for one of my projects and it did seem louder. I'm not sure how much dramatically louder the highest speed may be, but I don't think it'll really bother my housemates when their doors are closed (I work in the living room dining room table due to lack of space haha). I did notice that the plastic lid over the bobbin seem to shake at medium speed though...that part is a little worrying but I'm hoping it won't be that big of a problem, and I don't think I'll be moving on to full out medium and high speed yet. There's a button for leaving the needle up or down when you stop sewing which became incredibly useful when I was working on long chunks of straight sewing that still required periodic adjustment. As someone else also mentioned, I did notice that when I turn the wheel to pull the needle up and try to pull my garment out sometimes it's hard to pull - that's because my needle wasn't at the highest point apparently. Initially I broke thread (and got paranoid I'm gonna bend the needle) but now I know to just turn the wheel some more and pull the needle up further. Once it's in the "nice" zone it's very easy to pull out. There are maybe 3 things I'm not too happy with. One is the reverse stitch button - if you're using the foot pedal you basically have to wait a second or two before you can press that button, and vice versa. I'm guessing I know why for safety reason (or just how it's programmed), but what it means is that I find I can't do what I see a lot of youtubers are doing when doing back stitching - ie it's not nearly as fast. Most people I see them do a very speedy stop stitch, reverse stitch, then forward stitch and done. With this machine I have to stop wait a second, press the button, wait another second or two, then forward stitch again. If you don't wait long enough, you have to repress the button or the foot pedal - and if you do THAT too quickly it still doesn't work. What ends up happening is that I'm sitting there holding down the reverse button and nothing happens, I realize and I let go and repress and NOTHING HAPPENS. then I have stop and consciously count 1-2, and then press. It makes kind of a slow going and constantly causes me to forget to back stitch. the other thing that I was a little meh about was the fact that there's no mini screwdriver that comes with the machine. This means if you want to replace the needle or open the bottom for cleaning/unjamming, you'll have to have a set of mini screw drivers on hand. Most standard screw drivers are not small enough to fit in that tiny space (for example the screw for holding the needle). This thing came with a mini seam ripper but not a mini screw driver. :( That bummed me out. I did end up buying a mini screwdriver set from amazon anyway, but it can be a bit irritating if you don't know and need to replace the needle and suddenly you have to pause your project. In my case, I ended up using a tweezer until I got my screwdriver set. the last thing was that a few times the bobbin thread got jammed on the bottom of the plate and it was insanely difficult to remove. I had to seam rip my garment out of there and at a latter point I was able to use my seamripper again to pull out the clump of thread. I'm really not sure why it got jammed, but it happened 2-3 times, with the last time being particularly bad. I'm going to assume it's from my inexperience, but just wanted to put it out there that it did happen. Because I still didn't have the mini screw driver at the time, I couldn't open the bottom plate to remove the thread clump so again irritating that it didn't come with something that can open it. Other than that, I LOVE this machine. So many different stitches AND it came with insane number of foots for free. I saw that a lot of other models/machines require you to buy the foots separately. The number of stitches and the number of foots that came for free was what really sold me on this (plus the price was excellent when I bought it and all the positive reviews!). As a total beginner to sewing, I find this to be a really excellent machine. Even at its current price it's still drastically cheaper than a lot of other machines with less stitches and attachments. Highly recommend this for beginners and intermediate sewers, but I imagine if you're a heavy duty seamstress, this might not really be for you (but I think if you're an experienced seamstress you'd know that anyway!)
