Don't give up!!!! It does take practice.

dont put so much pressure on trying to learn relax relax relax, just kinda get in the free flowing mood and practice, i found it helps to also get one of those dry eraser boards and marker and sometimes when i am sitting around i will doodle on it , start drawing continues lines as if you were FMQ

I love your avatar, I did one like that in blues and white. Would you show us a picture of the whole quilt please.

I am taking a class from Craftsy. Even though I've done quite a bit of FMQ, I am learning all sorts of little tricks to help with tension, thread choice, hand placement, etc. Good Luck to you. Not all practice is perfect. Most of mine was downright ugly. Because it is "free motion" it will never be perfectly uniform, but the over-all look is great. Plus, it will have a part of your heart stitched into it because you have invested your time and talent.

Do you draw the stem with a pencil? I have found it easier to do feathers when I have a visual path to follow.

It helps to have a song in your head that gives you the rhythm you need in your hands....for me it is the Blue Danube waltz, it swoops and swirls musically so I can stitch swoops and swirls...Who else has a song for FMQ?

You can't expect your Fmq'ing to be as good as a professional Fmq'er. You have only been doing it for a couple of years. Most of them have been working at it for years. We are our own toughest critics.

Just as the way to Carnegie Hall is practice, practice, practice, so is the way to free motion quilting. Keep going, it will come!

I just practiced some FMQ the other day and I'm with you. There are some incredibly talented machine quilters out there, but I'm not one of them....even with practice I'm not sure I'll ever have a machine masterpiece because I'm really a hand quilter....albeit slow, it works for me.

Since slow as a snail works for my hand quilting, I thought slowing my machine down a bit might make my stitches look a tad more acceptable....and it did! To my surprise, slowing down made a huge difference. idk about your machine, but I have a range switch that controls my speed {since I'm pedal to the metal super fast most of the time, it was set on the highest speed} so I switched it up to a turtle's pace....seriously, it's turtle & the hare icons on there!! Massive improvement. I may get this yet & I'm sure you will too. Hang in there!! Practice a bit every week & you'll be there in no time.

You can sure tell from all the comments on this thread that we are all struggling to get this motion from our head to our hands/machine!! I took a class and the one thing that stood out for me the most was to keep my hand and foot speed consistent. Sometimes my hands move the fabric too fast and as I 'forget to breathe', my foot gets heavier on the control. Hopefully it will all come in time. Next question: where on earth do we find the time to do all this practicing???
And thanks for the links suggested in this thread. Good luck to all of us.