First Post

First Post

, Toyota Home Sewing dropped by Toyota GB’s headquarters to demonstrate the new Oekaki Renaissance model, and we couldn’t resist taking it for a ‘test-drive’.

Oekaki is Japanese for ‘to draw’. In Japanese, oekaki is spelt お絵描き, which can be separated into お as the formal prefix, the letter 絵 referring to ‘a picture’, and 描き as the kaki suffix. The name reflects the free-motion embroidery technology that the model, launched in November, employs. Free-motion embroidery enables users to draw designs directly onto the fabric – ideal for quilting, dressmaking and adding a personal touch to home furnishings.

There are two main operating modes, ‘Normal’ and ‘Oekaki’. When ‘Oekaki’ is selected, the function of the machine’s foot pedal switches from altering the speed of the stitch to altering the width of the stitch. We found the shifting functions easy to pick up, and as it is not possible to accidentally speed up a stitch in ‘Oekaki’ mode it means that creating detailed patterns is relatively straightforward.