outofthebasement

I have been tearing my hair about the binding of the wall hanging I' m making, so I stopped and did the quilting on this charity quilt.

I have such a love-hate relationship with my Viking 545. It does beautiful stitching, but the controls and some of the feet are so badly designed. For instance, the quarter inch foot has no "play" so although it works great for stitching two layers of fabric together, it stalls when I piece a block. Does this make sense? What is this foot for, anyway? Isn't it for quilting? So why isn't it designed to piece blocks? Another gripe is the shape of the walking foot. It is hard to see the edge of the fabric, so when I am stitching on a binding the seam allowance is a little wide, and so the binding ends up narrow and needs to be forced over the edge. I know I could cut the binding wider, but I am just beginning to understand what is going on and why I have this trouble. I also cannot do a machine stitched binding because the open toes of the walking foot don't flatten the binding. I had no trouble making bindings with the old machine. In fact, I am going to use the old generic walking foot for bindings in the future. I did that on this charity quilt, and it worked so much better. And then the controls--little tiny buttons that have to be hit just exactly right or they don't work. So when you think you are backstitching, you aren't!

Anyone else have this machine? Do you have problems with it? Is it just me?