PIQF 2008

I'll start out this annual PIQF post by showing you the few things I bought from the zillions of merchants this year:

Aieeeeeeeee, the Wicked Witch of the West! I just had to buy this panel of Wizard of Oz pics. I mainly bought it for this particular image, as the Glinda the Good Witch looks so strange and distorted.

But the Ruby Slippers look pretty good don't they?

And one Halloween related fat quarter purchased. Looks so 1970's doesn't it? Especially with that avocado green. I like this kind of graphic look though.

Lastly, I bought this grey/black/silver cording "kit" to make a necklace for my spooky haunted house pendant from Sacred Suzie.

For the first time in many years I had nothing showing at PIQF, just plain forgot to enter. Guess this really has been my year off from quilt exhibits. sigh. Hopefully that will be changing soon!

But I went with a friend last Sunday and we had a great time and enjoyed the quilt display very much, the vendors, eh, not so much.

I took the time to put up the 90 or so pictures I took at PIQF 2008, I added lots of comments and observations when I remembered why I had taken that particular photograph. I noticed that I took a lot of detail photos this time. There were a lot of cool embellishment ideas that I wanted to take note of and look at later.

One of the trends that my friend Debbie and I noticed were the ornate golden frames around several quilts. Many quilters are either reproducing classic paintings or making their own and using frame-ish looking gold fabric to give the quilt the look of painting in a frame. There wasn't as much taupe this year (thank goodness) as last year, and there were a lot of leaf and tree related quilts.

The special exhibits they had were pretty cool, especially the one about international coins called Currency Exchange and the Slice of Southern California., all the same size about certain places in Southern California. Exhibits always look so good when all the quilts are the same size and shape. I was really bummed that my camera battery ran out before I got to the Rosalie Dace South Africa exhibit. Such cool work! The Los Hilos de la Vida exhibit was very moving and I was glad to get to see it in person after reading about it online.

I still do not and never will understand the New Quilts of Northern California exhibit however. My understanding of it was that they were to be unique, unusual, and innovative quilts recently made by Northern Californian quilters. Some years, the exhibit is mostly conforming to this idea and is quite special. Not this year though. My goodness, you couldn't tell it apart from the main PIQF exhibit with so many traditional block type quilts. Sure, there's a heaping helping of bitter in here as I've never been accepted to NQNC, but I figure I'll still keep trying and maybe someday it will make sense what the real criteria for choosing quilts for this exhibit really is.