Friday Feature: Leanne Parsons

Hi, everyone! My name is Leanne and I blog at Devoted Quilter (devotedquilter.blogspot.com). 

I grew up in Nova Scotia, but I now live in Newfoundland with my husband and our three sons. We also lived in Igloolik, Nunavut for 6 years after we got married.

I started quilting in university (at Acadia)  almost 20 years ago, when I decided to make a quilt for a friend as a wedding gift. I started small...or maybe not...the quilt I gave her was almost double bed size, had tons of hand applique and hand embroidery and was hand quilted! Crazy, I know, but it got me completely hooked on quilting.

For years I hand quilted everything, which took f.o.r.e.v.e.r. I have one quilt I made my oldest son that took me 6 years to finish, and most of that was because of the quilting. Well, actually, it was because I kept abandoning it for months at a time to work on other things that weren’t taking so long. 

Once I tried machine quilting, there was no turning back! Now free motion quilting is my absolute favourite part of the whole quilt-making process.

Being a part of the online quilting community has been amazing. I love having so many friends around the world who are as obsessed with fabric and making things as I am. It has been especially fun to exchange mini quilts and mini mini quilts with some of those friends.

It took almost 20 years, but I finally made a quilt for our bed last spring, and the pattern, Love Birds, was published in Make Modern magazine. I have had a few patterns published in magazines over the past couple of years, and I also sell PDFs of my patterns, none of which would have been possible without the online quilting community. I also challenged myself to host a mystery quilt-a-long, called Just the Basics, in 2016 and that was a lot of fun. All of the instructions are still available on my blog, so you can check that out if you’d like to make it too.

I have so many plans for things I want to make and share, it’s hard to keep myself from starting something new every week!

WIP Wednesday #281 @ TN&TN

Welcome back to work in progress Wednesday! 

My kids have gone back to school this week but there is no selfish sewing for me just yet. We've got a birthday here which means home-made cake and a hand-made outfit! This is the tenth birthday outfit I've made for this kid. Once I get these done I can get back to the quilting I love so much. (Who am I? I'm Nicole, the new host of this awesome linkup.)

Thanks for joining us this week; please share what YOU are working on right now. Finished or not, selfish sewing or not, please share! The linkup is open from noon Tuesday (Pacific time) until noon Thursday (Pacific time).

Also come back on Friday to read all about Leanne. 

Please include our button or the URL (http://needleandthreadnetwork.blogspot.ca/) into YOUR post so we can continue spreading the word about our artists' collective. 

Thanks for linking up, and see you on Friday!

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