Interesting Business Decisions

When it comes to sewing machines, I am not a fangirl for any one brand (except maybe Necchi). I have a Juki industrial serger, a Juki industrial sewing machine, and a Juki domestic serger, all excellent machines. I have a Bernina L860 serger and a Bernina Q20 longarm in a table. I have a Janome 6600P as my daily driver. I don’t own any BabyLock machines, but I have taught for stores who sell them and know enough to be able to say that they are also excellent machines. I teach Bernina serger mastery classes and have been very impressed with the design and quality of the Bernina L860 and L890 machines. (The L890 is a combo serger/coverstitch machine.) I love my L860 and would hate to give it up.

Bernina has a new machine, the L890 Quilter’s Edition.

I’m scratching my head a bit over this one. Quilting and serging are not two activities I think of together, although there here are occasions when a serger does come in handy on a quilt. Serging around the outside edge of a finished quilt top helps keep the edges neat and tidy, especially if the top is going to be hung up for display. And it is possible to attach binding with fusible thread in the lower looper such that the binding—or any hem, for that matter—can be folded over and ironed down as part of a neat finish.

When domestic sergers first became popular, in the late 80s and early 90s, some designers tried using them to piece quilts. You can find Eleanor Burns using a serger to piece quilts in some of her older videos. I think that sergers fell out of favor for quilt piecing due to the amount of thread in the seams—thread that added a considerable amount of extra weight to the top even before it was quilted. Even a three-thread narrow serger stitch is going to add two looper threads to the seam.

But technology advances. Today’s sergers have gone leaps and bounds beyond the three-thread Bernette machines of the late 1980s. The variety of threads available has expanded, too, and now includes some very fine threads—“fine” in terms of diameter as well as quality. Those may alleviate some of the weight issues in terms of piecing. The L890 has the distinction of being an excellent combo machine with coverstitch capabilities. Coverstitch machines are best known for making a hem on knitted garments which looks like a twin-needle stitch on the public side with a looper stitch covering (get it?) the raw edge of the hem on the inside. But coverstitch machines can also be used for many different kinds of surface design effects. Gail Yellen has several great videos demonstrating these techniques on her YouTube channel. Combining those stitches with a variety of decorative threads opens up a world of creative possibilities.

With the release of the L890 Quilter’s Edition, Bernina seems to be trying to entice some of their loyal quilting customers to add a serger to their stable of machines. Almost all of my serger students also quilt, but the reverse is not automatically true. I question how eager the average quilter would be to purchase a serger, especially at the L890 price point. Most sewists think of sergers in conjunction with clothing construction and that may be a difficult prejudice to overcome. I think the L890QE is going to appeal most to those quilters who want to add surface design capabilities to their quilt projects. (Bernina did not release an L860 Quilter’s Edition because that model can’t do those kinds of stitches.) I am also curious to know if any of the software has changed and if those changes will be available to current L890 owners as an upgrade.

I’m reserving final judgment until I know more about the specific features of this edition. I wonder about it as a business decision, but it’s also possible that Bernina received requests for this kind of a machine from its customers. I’m sure I’ll learn more about it at Sew Expo, too.

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I drove the BMW to church yesterday. That’s only a four-mile trip on country roads, but the car seems to be driving nicely. We’ll see how it does when I run errands in town today. I do have a good mechanic.

This is a busy week, with classes tomorrow and Wednesday. I am not sure there will be much fondling of fabric, but a break isn’t a bad thing. I’m hosting a group here on Saturday for a denominational Zoom meeting, and that will be a good reason to clean the house Friday.

For fun, I leave you this sweet potato, which decided to sprout on my counter a few weeks ago.

I’m going to pop the end of it into a mason jar full of water and put it downstairs with the lettuce.