Growing my Bernina family.

My first sewing machine was a Brother GS2700 purchased from Spotlight. It has served me quite well - albeit with lots of testing of patience and snapping, jarring, tension problems, buttonhole problems etc. But, really, it was good of it to put up with me smashing it for over a year. 

Sadly it is now no longer working. This was a bit of a worry as I had outstanding orders at the time. Luckily I was able to borrow someone's Elna 21.

Definitely would not recommend this machine to anyone. It is very noisy and gets hot FAST. It did save me though in my time of need and I was very grateful that it did quite a nice button hole.

This series of events put me on the hunt (I was already planning on getting a new machine) for my dream machine. I thought it would be really nice to have a Bernina Bernette 20 after trying my sisters and being amazed at how beautiful it was and its stitches. But unfortunately I realised an electronic machine was not the way to go for me. For my heavy duty sewing I needed a mechanical work horse.

I checked on Gumtree a few times and found a few really excellent vintage machines. There was even a Bernina 850! This machine however was priced at $600 and had not been recently serviced.

I decided to check out a Bernina 801.

I loved it! All the reviews said they were awesome and I was not disappointed. I picked this one up for $150, although I know many people get them for $20 and less regularly from thrift stores.

Luckily for me this one had hardly been used. I found out it was made in 1980 (For Bernina's add 60 to the first 2 digits of barcode). I took it in to get serviced to make sure everything worked. The capacitor was busted so that needed to be replaced as did the light. All up it cost me $220 for the service making this machine $370 all up. 

It now runs like new and will outlast almost all machines on the market today. It is borderline industrial. It is very heavy being fully metal. It is so quiet! Almost silent running. The stitch quality is amazing.

I am a little in love.

 Everything printed on machine is still perfect.

 View from the top showing the stitch options.

 Close up of stitch options.

 Only minimal rust - but works better then those on new machines as it is spring loaded.

 Very easy to access bobbin case.

 Proof everything still works.

 Slowly growing my Bernina family.