I haven't read all the responses, so forgive me if I repeat information here. ;-). I started out trying to FMQ on my domestic and had a heck of a time wrapping my brain around it. I bought a Sweet 16 Sitdown and found it life changing in terms of advancing my FMQ. It was so liberating not to have the limited harp space. I didn't have a stitch regulator and over time I found my stitches just sorted itself out through perseverance and practice. I never really practiced on scrap sandwiches, but picked up cheap quilt kits to make projects with, most of which I gave away. I found that the structure of having a real quilt, encouraged me to do my best and challenged me to come up with appropriate quilting. I quilted everything from placemats to king sized quilts on my Sweet 16 with a lot of success. I was comfortable with rulers etc. I loved my Sweet 16. I got tired of the basting. I wasn't really looking for a longarm, but APQS had a sale on their Lenni machines and I bought one last year. It has been an interesting transition. The FMQ and ruler skills transferred quite readily, but the process is quite different. You can't just turn the quilt if you want to stitch a motif you are comfortable with in a certain direction. You can't just quilt from one corner diagonally across your quilt, think cross hatching. You only have a limited amount of the quilt visible at one time, depending on your throat space. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just different and something you have to learn to adapt to. There are pros and cons to both ways. The financial investment can be significantly more for a longarm set up. Anyway, There is no substitute for doing your homework and trying out a few different machines and styles of machines and even then, you may still be or likely will be uncertain. Everyone of them has a learning curve. Enjoy the process. Good luck. BTW. I love my Longarm :-).