Pfaff Creative Elevate 680 Sewing Machine with Embroidery Expansion Capability

Over 400 stitches, and nine buttonholes that measure themselves

Utility, decorative, quilting, heirloom and specialty stitches, up to 9mm wide, with four sewing fonts for labeling a quilt or putting a name inside a jacket. Every stitch can be adjusted for width, length and position.

There are nine Sensormatic one-step buttonholes. Drop the button into the foot and the machine measures it and stitches every buttonhole on the garment to that size.

The stitches only PFAFF makes

Floating, Radiant, Ribbon, Lace Edge and Stacking stitches are PFAFF's own techniques, and they are the ones people notice on a finished piece. They build texture rather than just pattern.

The beautiful couture look these stitches are impressive and you can't get them any where else but Pfaff. Tapering finishes a decorative row at a chosen angle, and mirror imaging flips it to run the other way down an applique or finished edge.

A 7 inch screen, and a coach living inside it

The screen is 7 inches of full color, 153 by 85mm, and it swipes and pinches the way a tablet does. Settings, stitch previews and edits are all on it, at a size you can read without leaning in.

The built-in Learning Center is the part worth knowing about. Step by step tutorials with illustrations and animations cover threading, winding a bobbin, specialty stitches and the accessories, right there on the machine when you need them.

The machine does the small jobs for you

Push the lever and the needle is threaded, for home machine needles from size 70 to 120. The thread cutter takes both top and bobbin threads at a button. The presser foot lifts itself when you need to pivot. Tension is set automatically.

Top and bobbin thread sensors speak up when the needle thread breaks or the bobbin is running down, so you find out at the moment it happens rather than at the end of a row.

360 by 200mm to work in

That is room for a quilt block, a bold motif across a bag, or a run of lettering along a border without stopping to rehoop.

Exact Position helps you line up multiple hoopings so the sections meet, and multi-hooping handles designs bigger than the hoop. Jump stitches are trimmed automatically as it goes, so there is far less snipping afterward.

330 designs and eight fonts, before you buy a single file

The designs cover floral, decorative, quilting and modern motifs. The eight embroidery fonts each come in three sizes with capitals, lowercase, numbers and symbols, which is what you need for a name, a date or a phrase.

On screen you can resize, rotate, mirror, combine motifs and add text, then color sort the thread so you change spools once per color instead of every time it comes round again.

Angela Huffman, host of Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting PBS show and founder and owner of Quilted Joy.

The reason we like this machine is that it lets you buy in the order that suits your budget instead of the order the catalog suggests. Start with the sewing machine. Come back for the embroidery unit next year, or the year after, or not at all.

Quilted Joy is a family-owned authorized PFAFF dealer in Louisville, Kentucky, and the home of the Quilt Fairies. Our technicians are factory certified for PFAFF and your machine is serviced in our own shop. Your Pixie Playdate owner classes are free with no limit on how many you take, and when you add the embroidery unit later, you come back for more. Every PFAFF we sell is eligible for the Quilt Fairy Godmother Program.