Zig-Zagging Through PIQF

Last month I met up with Jaye and her mom, Mary to see the PIQF show in Santa Clara.  It was a great show this year, and it was really fun to see it together with them. We each notice really different things about quilts, so it's fun to talk about them all at once.  And it was really great to see Jaye's quilt Zig Zaggy hanging in the special exhibit New Quilts of Northern California (yay Jaye!).

 Jaye and I both bought this template from Come Quilt With Me for our next hey-cut-me-one-of-those-out-of-your-fabrics-when-you-feel-like-it quilts.  We did that using their templates (which are great, very well-made) for the Tumbler quilt I'm still working on and her Eye-Spy quilt.
We're both going to do our own background fabrics and cut out the windmill shapes for each other.  I haven't tried to make a block yet, hope it isn't too hard.

I had to buy these lovely soft fall colors, dyed in Kenya along with some very cool rolled paper beads.  Oh man the guy running this booth, Akonye Kena was a hoot, I could have chatted with him all day.
I also bought a new ironing board cover but I haven't put it on yet, so I'll tell you about it after I've managed it (wish me luck, it's a little involved).

I noticed in the quilts that I took pictures of  that I was focused on noticing many things like:

• interesting stitching, both machine and hand-embroidery 
• use of other pre-quilted/embroidered/embellished/exotic textiles 
• unusually shaped quilts (hooray! finally!)
• circles
• leaves 
• interesting found objects as embellishments
• dimensional shapes as part of the quilt
• text/fonts on the quilt surface