I've already pieced and quilted two baby quilt tops on the Janome 6500, and I love it! The 1/4" piecing foot made the piecing so easy! Quilting with the even feed foot was easier and fed more evenly than the walking foot on my Viking machine. I used stitch 28 and variegated thread to quilt all 16 pinwheels on each of the two quilts.
It took hours to make the quilts, but the extra throat space on the machine's harp made it so much easier to move the quilt all around while stitching. The needle up/down feature set to down allowed me to pivot around corners easily. I used the automatic bobbin thread cutter several times, too. These features actually saved time and made a better quilting experience than I've had in the past.
The drawbacks to my new Janome machine: large size and weight, price tag, and thread lint build up in needle uptake lever area of the machine. I still love it, though! Also, the machine was only available at one brick and mortar dealer nearby for purchase. Luckily, that one dealer actually let me test drive the machine for myself.
Another odd drawback of the machine was that it continued to stitch even after I removed my foot from the pedal. It took three or four more stitches by itself. Not sure why, but I suspect possible overheating from hours of sewing--or maybe the foot pedal jammed somehow. Not a big deal.
I used the Sizzix Bigz Tessellating Pinwheel die to make all the fabric cuts for both quilts. The second quilt (not pictured) has a pink binding, but is otherwise nearly identical to the one shown. The die made fabric cutting easy and much safer for me than rotary blade cutting. The 2 1/2" strip die made the bias binding strips for both quilts really easy. I like how the die only has blades along the sides of the strips and not at the top and bottom. That enables me to control the length of the strips.
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