You probably have plenty of advice, but the best purchase I ever made was the Sew Slip teflon sheet that goes over the "quilting table" but under the quilt sandwich. The teflon is quite frictionless and it makes the movement of the fabric almost effortless. I hope you keep after it, because it took me most of a king size quilt before I was really comfortable with it. It is a fine tune adjustment to get the needle up and down at a proper speed to make your stitches look good. I found that the rhythm of my machine for FMQ was just about the same as the rhythm I use for piecing and I would envision the speed at which the machine would be doing the design and then make myself slow down to that rhythm. Good luck.