About Me
My name is Don Linn, also known as "Mr. Quilt." The Mr. Quilt moniker started as a joke among my friends and family and was a take-off on Bob Uecker, Mr. Baseball. The name seems to have stuck over the years and has really changed my life. It initially led me to be a guest on Alex Anderson's show on HGTV "Simply Quilts."
I started my adventure in quilting as a long-arm machine quilter. My becoming a machine quilter is the end result of a corporate downsizing and not being able to find employment in the city where my wife and I live. My wife drug me to a quilt show on the Oregon coast and while waiting for her to shop in the vendor area, I spied a lady operating a sewing machine on rollers and tracks. It was a Singer industrial sewing machine, not even a long-arm. I had no idea what she was doing, but I have always loved machines and making things. After watching her for awhile, I worked up the courage to ask her what she was doing. She shut off her machine and led me by the arm through the show and forced me to look at the quilts, and more importantly the quilting. I was amazed at the creativity that I saw. She told me that people actually paid her to do the quilting. I was astounded by this concept. On the way home I got to thinking that my wife had a couple of quilt tops that needed quilting and I wondered if perhaps a few others in town needed some quilting done too. A long story made short, after doing very little research, I had a long-arm machine ordered about 3 weeks later.
Since I didn't even really know what a quilt was it took me about 6 frustrating months to get the machine modified to be maneuverable enough to do the kind of work that I wanted to do and to teach myself to do heirloom style quilting. At that time there were no lasers, stitch regulators, or computers running machines and the only work that most long-arm quilters were doing was pantograph all over work.
After teaching myself to machine quilt and doing quilting for others for some time, I decided to try my hand at doing programs for guilds. This took a lot of courage on my part since I was always the one who was terrified of speaking in front of a group. In addition, I found out that I needed to have quilts to do a trunk show and since I did not have any quilts except for a few whole cloth ones, I had to teach myself to piece quilts too. The cutting and piecing process turned out to be a very humbling experience. Being a typical male, I figured that if ladies could do this then it should be easy for a man to do. I had no idea how hard it was to do a good job of making a simple quilt.
My first pieced quilt was some kind of flower and let me tell you it was BAAAAAAD. I threw it in the trash 3 times before finally getting it finished. My second pieced quilt was a Double Wedding Ring. People told me how hard it was to make, but not knowing anything about quilts, I forged ahead and had the top cut out and pieced in a little over a week. The old saying "there is no fool like and old fool" certainly applies to me. As a result of making this quilt, I found that I really enjoyed curved piecing and now all of my pieced quilts have at least some, if not all, curved pieces.
After making several quilts for my trunk show and doing a few programs, I decided to begin teaching quilting classes. My first class was on machine quilting and I have been teaching it for over 10 years. I set out to take my techniques that I developed for my long-arm machine quilting, and transfer them to home machines. Over the years I have taught hundreds of people to machine quilt with tremendous success. During this time, I began designing my own quilts and teaching classes on my designs, along with some traditional designs as well.
Most recenty, I have been fortunate enough to have had 3 books published by C&T Publishing. You can learn more about these books elsewhere on my website.
My life has truly been a journey and an adventure since my corporate downsizing. I have gone from being completely bottomed out, to doing things that never in my life would I have dreamed of doing. I am blessed to be able to do something that I enjoy and to be surrounded by so many wonderful creative people.
I live in Redding, California, which is about 100 miles south of the Oregon border. My wife Donna was my high school sweetheart and in 2011 we will celebrate our 46th wedding anniversary.
I also enjoy working in other media in addition to quilting. Among those are woodcarving, glass fusing, sandblasting glass, metal sculpture, Blacksmithing, pencil drawing and, most recently, experimenting with water color painting.
The greatest joy in life is teaching people to do things that they never thought they could do.