4 more reasons to love the amazing NQ900 from Brother

Last month on QUILTsocial I tested out the NQ900 sewing machine from Brother. I made a cute appliqued baby quilt and fell in LOVE with the sewing machine. Since then I actually purchased the machine from Brother and have been sewing up a storm!!

In my first post last month I talked about six features of the NQ900 that I loved as soon as I started using it. This week I’m going to talk about a few more that I’ve come to appreciate as I’ve been using the NQ900 for more and more projects.

The knee lift

When I was doing the machine applique on my baby quilt last month, I used the knee lift (in combination with the needle down position) a lot!! It was so great to be able to keep my hands on the project, lift the foot with the knee lift and swing the fabric around so that it was in the right position to keep stitching!

The automatic thread cutter

So, I’ve never had a machine with an automatic thread cutter, so it’s taken me a while to REMEMBER that the button is right there on the front of the machine, but now that I’m used to it, it is AWESOME!!! Especially for chain piecing!! No longer do I have to sit and clip all those threads between pieces of fabric that have been sewn using the chain piecing technique.

Now, once I have sewn the first seam and set my next pair of fabrics up to slide under the foot, I just push the thread cutter button and all of those pairs of fabric will just pull apart with a little tug – BRILLIANT!!

If you’ve never heard of the ‘chain piecing’ technique, here’s a little video that I found on YouTube that explains the procedure.

The large throat

Since I do most of my machine quilting on my Gammill quilting machine, it never really bothered me that my old sewing machine only had about 5″ from the needle to the arm, but now that I have my new NQ900, I can’t believe the difference in space. This machine has 8.3″ from needle to arm which gives me SO MUCH SPACE for quilting and piecing. And the extra LED lights in that space are amazing!!

Jam-resistant Quick-set™ drop-in bobbin

My old machine had the bobbin case that you had to remove (from the front of the machine), put in the bobbin, thread it through the case, and then TRY (without being able to see what you were doing) to line the bobbin case up correctly with the rest of the mechanism under the needle. By comparison, changing the bobbin in the NQ900 is a breeze!! Just take off the see-through cover, take out the old bobbin, drop in your new bobbin, pull the thread through the slot, trim and start sewing!! Piece of cake!!! I love it!

The other advantage of this type of bobbin is that you can see the bobbin turning as you’re piecing. So…..if the bobbin isn’t turning, you know that you’re out of bobbin thread!

And there’s even more….

With all of this, I still haven’t tried out the non-stick foot or sideways sewing (yes, you read that right), so this week, that’s what we’re going to do! I’ve got a great project planned to use up some saved selvedges, add vinyl pockets and use the sideways sewing function on the NQ900 to add different pieces of hardware. Make sure to join me tomorrow, when we get started on this week’s project!