Yesterday I drove down to Fort Collins, CO and visited Kelly at Jukebox Quilts to try out a Gammill longarm quilting machine. Kelly said the best way to discover whether you like one or not is to bring along a small quilt and try it out. Well I still had that Kaffe Fassett jelly roll flimsy that needed to be quilted. I had a back ready but it was very pieced. Since I want to do pieced backs as well as solid backs I figured there's no better time to find out about the pitfalls than now.
Here I am at a 22" Gammill Vision basting the quilt top. Kelly and her crew prefers to float their tops so that they can double check any issues with the batting as they quilt. Since the top is basted there's no problems with going back and forth on the quilt for a variety of needed quilting - SID, quilting one color at a time, etc.
After I quilted the top (I opted for a fairly large abstract pantograph as it was my first time doing it) I spent quite a few hours watching how they loaded other quilts. I especially was impressed with how the Statler worked (that's Gammill's computer aided quilting program). Kelly sat down with me and discussed business plans and how that works when you do this as a business. Her dealership also runs lots of training classes. In fact when I was there, a lady from South Dakota had driven to Fort Collins so that she could get two days of training on how to use the Statler for custom quilting. Another lady also quilts as a business and was telling me about her experiences with it.
I still have to try out a few other machines but I was very happy with how the Gammill stitched and was extremely impressed with how Kelly operates her dealership. It's not just how well a machine is built or runs, but the support that you get with it is also a big consideration. You can bet that I'll be back there again renting time on the machine. Maybe next time I'll try out the 26". It's definitely the start of a new adventure in quilting.
