If you can drop or cover your feed dogs & have an embroidery or darning foot, you can free motion quilt. The walking foot will help a lot for stitch in the ditch and sewing bindings on. Most feet have "generics" available for reasonable prices but there are exceptions.
Google Diane Gaudinsky and Caryl Bryer Fallert. I believe they both quilt this way. I know Diane does. You might find videos on u-tube that will show you how they "puddle" the quilt up. You kind of roll up all 4 sides and clip them, then quilt in the puddle--unroll a little more--quilt in new puddle.
I tried it but arthritis in the shoulders & trying to work with the tiny little harp space on my Singer machine quickly made me switch to Quilt as You Go & hand tying methods.
Eventually I moved up to a 9" machine. Later added a machine quilting frame and just recently got a 17" machine and more sturdy frame.
If you really get into quilting, you'll find a way to get it done and save your pennies/watch craigslist like a hawk/hit rummage sales and flea markets...whatever it takes to move up the scale. You might also like using the Flynn frame which is cheap and easily made if you don't want to buy the "real" one. Because of my shoulder problem, it didn't work too well for me and I had all ready fallen in love with stand up machine quilting.