Maybe you should just give up on the quilting for a while and write articles for magazines!! I'm still laughing, but No, No not at you! I think you could earn enough to take some one-on-one lessons!

Good Luck!! :thumbup:

Tip for everyone trying Free Motion Quilting (FMQ)

Put some music on! Listen to the music and RELAX! Don't worry about getting it right...it will just flow out of your hands and onto your quilt if you relax and go with the flow.

Works for me anyway.... :)

Im not sure if it will help but I have a friend that does a bit of FMQ and she has a seperate bobbin case that has had the tension adjusted for FMQ she changes the case if she is sewing

Love this post! I, too, have tried several times and found I could quilt by hand so much faster and only a few stitches had to be removed and redone. It is one thing to manage a small sandwich under the needle than to handle a quilt under the needle. Someday, if I live long enough, I might finish one sandwich whereby I exclaim "I did it!"

I'm laughing too, not at the problems, but been there and still there, I started quilting my red, white, and blue quilt yesterday, it was going well, put lots of saftey pins to hold it all together, first block I did was perfect same with the second, finally getting the ideal of it all, so I quit looking at the back side and just sewing away, back started to hurt so, I got up and look at my quilt and I couldn't believe it...freaking puckers every where, made me mad and I put it up, gonna have to get the seam ripper out and just not into that quite yet...

What a great story teller she is!

I have just bought a Janome Horizon and was hoping to do FMQ, I am scared now!!

After taking several machine quilting classes, I too am in the practice, practice, practice stage, and it still looks soooooo bad that I do not know whether to laugh or cry or just stick to hand quilting!

It's hard, I know - and I took classes as well, and my teacher told me to relax, not to try too hard ( very difficult thing to do). I was trying to meander, and it just looked awful! I let the whole thing go completely and focused on what I do know how to do Later I went back with a large mug of tea, some good music with gentle rythms, and just went for it. It did work then! The moment I start to "think" it goes wrong. Try some incense, relaxing music, anything to get you "in the mood" and try again, without any expectations. Perhaps that would help?

If you can, try to position a pen or marker into a vice that holds it steady and upright. Then move the paper around under it, as if you were FMQ'ing to re-train your brain. When we doodle, we move the pen around the paper and I think when we start on FMQ our brains want to do what they know and it causes a dis-connect.

That said, the best I can do is follow traced lines and do loopty loops but it's a million times better than it was a few months ago. I think there might be something to the wine suggestion. Everyone on here swears by it. If all else fails, there's always that.
;)
Good luck. We've all been there.

It took you time to learn how to write so well. And it will take you time to FMQ so well. Don't be so hard on yourself!
Of course, this is coming from someone who is "rotary challenged" as well as "FMQ challenged". I practice some but usually I just piece a charity quilt then dive into the FMQ right on the piece. It has gotten a little better over time.
If it was the 70's I would have smoked a joint then FMQ'd....but alas those days are long gone. Stick with it. I have (as well as many here) posted about my crappy quilting. In fact I am going to a friend's house today who is a wonderful cross stitcher. We always play show & tell when we get together. I am taking a small wall hanging I made that has some of my terrible FMQ work....luckily she knows squat about quilting! But I still have pride in my work. As today's FMQ is better than last month or last year. Not being brought up in a crafty family all aspects of quilting is brand new to me at the ripe age of 55. Now I just take time to laugh at myself!