Free Motion Machine Quilting

Don Linn lives in Redding, California, with his wife and high school sweetheart, Donna. He and Donna have a grown son and daughter who also live in California.Since childhood, Don has loved to make things and to work with his hands. His first sewing projects involved automobile upholstery and making clothes for himself and his wife while in college.Don had an entire career working in various manufacturing facilities as a draftsman. It was here that he dealt with a wide array of geometric shapes while doing machine design work before returning to college. After college he worked in upper management in both the forest products industry and the precast concrete industry. During this time he drew upon his experience as a draftsman in designing machinery and doing production drawings.Don's journey in quilting began after a corporate downsizing. He started out with a longarm machine and not a clue how to operate it. Since then, he has taught himself how to machine quilt, design, and piece quilts. He is now a well-known teacher of machine quilting and piecing classes.

June 11I’d like to be a great machine quilter. But, I don’t want to practice all that much. Silly, I know. After reading Don Linn’s Free-Motion Machine Quilting, I’m thinking there might be hope for me. I may not become e a great machine quilter, but possibly an OK machine quilter and certainly not without practice! The step-by-step photos and straight forward text offering advice such as …“If you do not move the fabric after the machine has taken 3 or 4 stitches, the thread will probably break, and you will have to start over again…” give me hope. Don hands out homework that he calls “Practice Exercise.” He shows you what problems look like (tension problems, stitch length problems) and then tells you how to solve them. His writing style is chatty, as if you have a quilting coach right in the room with you. Don patiently walks you through learning to draw and stitch designs one baby-step at a time, until suddenly you understand how to stitch feathers. You learn how to select designs that are appropriate for your quilt, and how to mark the quilt top. He provides inspiring photos of finished quilts and an eight-page quilting design gallery filled with designs to be enlarged to fit your quilt blocks.