I am starting to wonder if, in addition to my what I may be doing wrong, there is something wrong with my machine. It was repaired last year and had a problem with the timing I think. I have FMQed successfully in the past so, I can't be sure. What's different now is the size of the quilt and the thread. One change at a time, I built up my table area with boxes level to the machine, I changed the needle to a ball point 14, then to a 16. Still have shredding at the needle. I lowered the tension. I finally made it through the next part of the quilting but oh boy, what torture! Lots of restarting when the thread broke. Still some hopping and choking and even some loops on the bottom this time. I'm using Coats and Clark poly thread. Is that too low quality? I tried three different ways to upload a photo (2.5MB jpeg) and got an error message every time: failed to upload. ::sigh::