About the Author

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.

Reviews

June 11 I’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.
*American Patchwork & Quilting*

June 11 Homespun's Favourite Free-Motion Machine Quilting by Don Linn Look past the world's most boring front cover and turn the pages of this fabulous book to acquire, then hone, skills in free-motion quilting. This is a real workshop on paper. Don begins with advice about tools, supplies and workspace - not terribly exciting but very important for your success - and then moves on to some graded exercises, illustrated with good-quality photographs and accompanied by notes on some of the common problems that beginners encounter with free-motion quilting. And that's one of the things that makes this book especially good: Don doesn't pretend that you'll sit down in front of your sewing machine, follow his instructions and immediately start free-motion quilting like an expert. No doubt his experience in conducting face-to-face workshops has shown him that most people stumble at first, so his book patiently explains how to address the most common problems. He's also included some guidelines for quilting more complex designs and a gallery of his quilts that highlights different styles of free-motion quilting.
*Australian Homespun*

June 11 Free-Motion Machine Quilting by Don Linn Are you a member of the totally terrified group when the words 'free-motion quilting' are uttered? Don Linn, otherwise known as Mr. Quilt will take you on a journey where you can refine your free-motion skills, master a variety of techniques, which include perfectly stitched points, absolutely straight lines, and smooth curves, and help you along the way with a visual trouble shooting guide to common machine quilting problems. Take a deep breath and prove that you CAN quilt it yourself.
*Fabrications*