PIQF - Day 4

Today was the last day of classes for me, and it ended on a very high, almost coloratura, note! After two very stimulating and challenging classes, today was a relax-and-totally-enjoy-yourself class with one of my favorite teachers ever... Sue Dennis. I took three classes from Sue at last year's festival, and had buckets of fun... mostly behaving like a kid and making colossal messes with paint! In today's class we transformed batik fabrics, already beautiful in their own right, into something extra special through the use of paint sticks. We then cut and pasted pieces of our "new" fabric onto a dark background and added a touch of some totally cool stuff called "Angelina", which has to be seen to be believed. Here are pictures of Sue's class samples...




The shiny stuff going across the quilts is the Angelina... sort of a brightly colored, iridescent angel-hair wannabe. It sticks to itself when ironed, and then is stitched to the quilt after everything else is completed, including the quilting. When the iridescent Angelina is added to the iridescent paint sticks, you have Bling of impressive proportions!! Everything we did today was so cool, I can hardly wait to play around with it all again. Lani and Dale were in the class with me, and we had too much fun. I'm looking forward to seeing their finished work. Here's my piece - just the top and without the Angelina...


... and here's a few pictures of some works in progress in the classroom...




After class, I did another two-hour stint of walking around the show looking at quilts. For whatever reason, I'm enjoying the show more than ever this year. There are some incredible quilts to see - over 800 - and a great many of them are contemporary, or inovative, which is my preferred style. However, having taken Didi's classes this year, I now have a far greater appreciation than ever for the traditional, hand quilted and hand apliqued quilts, though I know I'll never make one, nor do I want to.

I had dinner with Jan, and then we went to "Show and Tell", where all of the teachers were presented and showed a bit of their own work, and invited their students to come forward and show off the work they did in their classes. In honor of the festival's 20th anniversary, the Mancuso Brothers, who have been at the helm of this event since the beginning, presented a slide show featuring highlights of the last 20 years. Since this is my 15th year, it was fun to see a lot of quilts and teachers I remembered. This was followed by an incredible ice-cream buffet out in the lobby. What a spread it was, and a great way to wind down the week. I'll be heading home tomorrow afternoon after I take just one more trip through the show and take pictures of the quilts I missed today when my camera batteries went south.

Here's today's quilt show...



'African Idiom 7' by Jenny Hearn


'Pismo Beach' by Denise Killingsworth


'Dreaming of the Northern Lights' by Helen Granville


'Celtic Persian' by Suzette Ehlers


I think this may be "it" for the critter quilts...


'Desert Life' by Hilda Koning-Bastiaan


'It Came From Beneath the Sea' by Roberta De Luz


Silicon Valley sunset from my hotel window...