Emma Seymour (she/her) is a senior product analyst at the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Textiles, Paper and Apparel Lab, where she has led testing for luggage, pillows, towels, tampons and more since 2018. She graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor of science in fiber science and apparel design and a minor in gerontology, completing research in the Body Scanner Lab on optimizing activewear for athletic performance. Please note that Brother branded products are not for sale outside of Canada. We stock 194 colors of Gütermann cotton thread that we provide for free. The NQ1700E is another embroidery-only machine, but it has several combination machine counterparts.
It fundamentally depends on how often you use your sewing machine and how intensively you pursue your hobby. Do the same from above the stitch plate, which allows you to remove the residual fluff from the feed dog so you can once again work in a clean environment. If you also embroider with your sewing machine, you must oil it often because the machine is put under more stress with the high speeds than it is when performing simple sewing work. In addition, the buttonhole function is so lacking that after multiple tries, I couldn’t even complete one acceptable buttonhole.
You can even customize stitches by drawing on the large touchscreen display. The largest hoop size, at 10″ x 6.3″, accommodates massive embroidery designs. After testing, all GH analysts agreed that this was one of their favorite machines. For under $500, this sewing machine with embroidery options is an absolute steal.
The Brother XR9550 had the easiest stitch setup of all the machines we tested. But winding the bobbin, though easy, didn’t have quite as stellar a finished result as we would have hoped — the thread on the bobbin wound unevenly with a crooked, wobbly fill. Still, that’s not a dealbreaker, considering how easy the rest of the sewing machine is to use. The sewing machine is operated brother scan and cut using a display, which is generally a touch screen with a modern swiping function on the more expensive models. Operation is very intuitive and the logistics and menu operation of the integrated software is similar to that of a computer or a smartphone. Additional settings can be adjusted under the setup option – these settings may be more or less extensive depending on the model.
Let Ken’s Sewing Center help you choose your new Brother sewing machine. We also have a large selection of parts and accessories for all Brother sewing machine models. The Janome Arctic Crystal and the Singer 3337, which their respective manufacturers advertise as great entry-level options, are too simple for the purposes of this guide—to us, they felt like toys brother machine that sewists would grow out of quickly. Among other oversimplifications, the stitch width on both machines isn’t adjustable; as a result, they limit the sewist to just one size of zigzag stitch, for example. The 3337 doesn’t even have a manual thread cutter, a small razor embedded into the side of the machine, which seems like the ultimate corner-cutting move.
You can now view all accessories for sewing, embroidery and quilting machines, as well as overlockers and coverstitch machines online. Within the continental United States (the contiguous 48 states), Shipping is FREE to customers on orders over $49. Orders being shipped to Hawaii, Alaska, Canada, APO’s, FPO’s and DPO’s are not eligible for free shipping. Also, the free shipping policy does not apply to large or heavy items that require special shipping methods such as assembled industrial sewing machines and some sewing cabinets.