I've gotten pretty proficient with my skill at long arming, but I just don't think well in terms in quilting design. It isn't my strong suit at all. Can't tell you how many times my initial review of one of my projects is "another fine top ruined by bad quilting". I no longer have the access to my friend's long arm that I once have and now I'm back to my domestic rig. Good for me is about a year ago a friend gifted me with a modern Bernina that has a massive deep throat to work with. I don't want to do queen sized quilts with it (the size I usually make), but I could.
On my vintage domestic machine that I've been using for most of the last 30 years, I never could do a whole lot of fancy stuff, for one it required a darning plate to disengage the feed dogs which I didn't have. The throat space was small. Still, I managed to simply grid a king sized log cabin and feed it through the thing.
I could do simple grids and curves in the body of the quilt, so like an Orange Peel design or a Clamshell was about as fancy as I could get. So I did fancier stuff on the borders.
With 10 quilts down, you should be able to figure out some of your problems. Like wonky stitch lengths or whatever -- when you go back and look at the quilts 6 months later are you still noticing the stitches? Mostly for me it's when the work is fresh and I've been staring at it from 8 inches away, but somehow a year down the road and I'm a lot more tolerant.
Machine quilting isn't necessarily fast -- but the thing is it is faster than hand quilting for most of us. Sometimes we do have to adjust our expectations on how long it will take to do something and keep repeating to ourselves "this would take me a year by hand" when we are trying to get it done by Friday
