Just got this baby delivered yesterday! I haven’t made a space for it in the sewing room yet so I set it up on my dining room table for now.

My primary sewing machine for the past 20 years has been a Janome Memory Craft 6500P. My mom bought it a year before I caught the sewing bug, and when she saw how much I fell in love with sewing she decided to give me her machine and bought another one for herself. It’s been a great machine and I can’t even tell you how many hours I have on it. However, it does have some quirks:

• The automatic thread cutter sucks. It has sucked from Day One. It always leaves a big thread nest unless I use a leader cloth, and if I need to use a leader cloth all the time I feel like it’s quicker to just use the built in manual thread cutter and snip the threads afterwards
• It sometimes it goes for another stitch or two after I stop stitching, especially with heavier weight materials. I’ve seen other people complain about this.
• Regular buttonholes are super easy and good quality, but it struggled with making nicely rounded keyhole buttonholes, especially on heavier fabrics.

When Juki Junkies advertised last month that they were going to sell the Juki TL-2010Q floor models being used at Quilt Con at a discount, I decided to go for it. Right now this machine sells for around $1200. I got mine for $950 with shipping included. My husband didn’t really understand why I wanted it, but when I said it would take the place of birthday, Christmas, anniversary, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day etc gifts for the next two years he thought that was a pretty good deal 😂.

This machine is marketed for quilters and bag makers. Nearly everything I sew is a garment. Now why did I want a straight stitch only machine like this?

• I have a compound walking foot industrial (the Seiko STH8-BLD-3). I don’t use it very often because it is for heavy materials, but I love how it is simple, super reliable and feeds everything through with ease. It does one thing, but it does it really well. It will never die and likely outlast me. I wanted this same experience with a machine that handles lighter fabrics. After going through two expensive sergers that performed beautifully but ultimately failed due to their complexity, I just wanted something simple and reliable.
• If I had the space I would have probably gotten the Juki 8700 industrial; however, my sewing room is a small spare bedroom and between my four other machines (Janome 6500, Janome MyLock 204D serger, Janome 300e embroidery machine, Janome Coverpro 2000CPX coverstitch) and my cutting table, ironing board, etc I just don’t have the room. (As it is now I have to keep the Seiko in my basement.)
• Speed! My Janome maxes out at 1000 stitches per minute. The Juki does 1500 stitches per minute.
• The Juki allows you to use a lot of industrial sewing machine feet, which are often much cheaper and more effective than domestic sewing machine feet.
• As I mentioned before, my current Janome is 20+ years old and being computerized, I have no idea how long it is going to last. I know that parts are getting harder to find for it.

My Juki Tl-2010Q just arrived a day ago so I haven’t had much time to sit down and play with it yet, but so far I am very happy with its performance. It feeds the fabric easily and I feel like the presser foot design makes it easier to topstitch, especially around corners, without a guide. The thread cutter also works GREAT!

The things I don’t like so far:

• It doesn’t have a 3/8” seam allowance mark on the stitch plate, but a magnetic guide will take care of that.
• The automatic threader sucks! My Janome is so much easier to use. Despite some practice I am just threading it by hand more often than not.
• There’s a learning curve to the foot pedal. You have to be careful to not hit the back of it or else it activates the automatic thread cutter. I believe there’s a piece you can buy to prevent this from happening, but it’s another $20 added to the purchase price.

Now for the big test…buttonholes!

My mom recently gave me an old Singer branded buttonholer which was probably from the late 60s. My dad worked a bit back then as a machinist at the Griest buttonholer factory in New Haven, Connecticut. He ended up leaving the job less than a year later because it was mind numbingly dull, but while he was working there he brought home a Singer branded Greist buttonhole attachment with all the cams for my mom. She used it for a while but eventually switched to one of the first computerized Viking machines.

I wasn’t sure if it would work with my Juki since it is a high shank machine (and the high shank Greist buttonholers are apparently harder to find) but I can confirm that it does work. Maybe those photos will help those looking on the secondhand market for a vintage buttonholer to fit their Juki,

Here are some action photos, along with a video of me doing the second pass for the larger keyhole buttonhole. I used three layers of a midweight 100% linen and Gutermann Mara 120 thread.

Now for some finished samples. I think they came out great!

If you’ve never used one of these attachments before I found this tutorial very helpful. I don’t recall if the video tutorial mentions it or not, but make sure you drop your feed dogs before attaching the plate! It was late at night when I first tried using this attachment and I couldn’t figure out when I turned the hand wheel to test the action why the bottom plate wouldn’t stay in place 😂🤦‍♀️.

I hope to give this machine a better workout soon, but my time is more limited right now. My dad suffered a stroke last month. It was actually the same day that my husband ordered my Juki for me. Due to the disastrous experience he had at short term rehab, I decided to take him home with me to recover. It is definitely more work for me, especially since I am already the full time caregiver to my toddler son, but my son loves having him around and I no longer have the stress of wondering what was happening to him when we weren’t there to advocate. (Nights and weekends were particularly bad.) The good news is that he is much happier living with me right now, and we have a fantastic team of people from the local visiting nurse agency coming in helping out with various care and therapies. He was very active before this happened so he’s frustrated with his current condition and limitations, but I see a little bit more improvement every day.