Donna W Smith has a past life as a highly educated Meteorologist working as a research scientist, a traffic engineering consultant and an adjunct professor. When the opportunity to move to Colorado for her husband's job, she agreed as long as she could have a longarm quilting machine. In a new town with a son who hadn't yet started school and no support system, she got her first longarm quilting machine and soon found herself in business. Now only 19 years later, her son has his master's degree and Donna is still quilting away! But now she is in Saint Joseph, Missouri. With a studio in the basement of her home, she also enables two greyhounds, a cat and her husband. She supports the quilting community most recently with service in her local quilt guild and quilting for military outreach, including Quilts of Valor and community outreach quilts through her guild.
Donna has a comprehensive background in free-motion custom quilting and is considered the “go-to” for both free-motion custom and computerized edge-to-edge quilting. Her longarming skills have been featured in Quiltmaker, Fons and Porter, Quilters Newsletter, McCall’s Quilting, American Patchwork & Quilting Quilt Sampler and Quilter’s World magazines. Donna's quilting can also be found in Erin Russek’s Jingle Quilt, Piece & Applique a Holiday Heirloom pattern pack and the Quilting Daily Chawton Cottage Quilt Along. She also quilted several quilts for Laura Stone Roberts featured in the book Little House of Quilts and is excited to have quilted a quilt in the upcoming book by Judy Martin, Red, White & Blue Star Quilts.
Donna has two APQS quilting systems, a Millennium with an Intelliquilter (IQ) computer where she quilts computerized edge-to-edge designs and a Millie that she uses to create the hand-guided, one-of-a-kind custom quilting.