PIQF - First Report

I have returned from my lovely trip to San Jose, CA centered around attending the Pacific International Quilt Festival. The only bump in the road the whole trip was sitting in the airplane at San Jose yesterday morning for 1-1/2 hours waiting for the fog to clear in Seattle so we could fly there. Amazingly I made my connection to Bellingham, it was slightly delayed and arrived only about 30 minutes late. There was another bump regarding my inability to find a decent yarn store, but that's for another post.

I managed to take 54 pictures!!! There are a number that are blurry, but there's still a respectable amount that are post-able, but I won't subject you to all of them at once.

Right now I'm going to concentrate on the class I took on Friday, Woodcut Quilts with Laura Wasilowski (do I take the time to look the correct spelling up or waste time telling you I'm not sure about the spelling???).

Here's my table, that's my project in the lower right hand side, I never did get it very far along but I did make some neat elements.


I went around the room taking pictures of people and their projects. I got permission to take their picture, but I neglected to ask if it was OK to post it to my blog. So if anyone sees this (which is probably unlikely) and wants their picture removed, just let me know. Oh, and BTW, I forgot to ask/record their names. This first woman made an abstract design, very striking.
And on the same table this woman created mask faces.
This very successful and practically complete project was by a woman who grew up in Bellingham, small world, but now she live in California.
Here's Laura giving a demo on her fusible binding technique. She probably would not be very pleased with this unflattering pose, but it's what I caught. She's a great teacher, lots of information, very supportive and lots of fun, I'd highly recommend a class from her if you get the opportunity.
At the end of the class everyone held up their work for all to ooh and aah. There was a huge variety in the projects.
This gorgeous apple was created by a woman from Anchorage, AK. She has plans to fill in the background to finish it.
In the "learning more about yourself" department, I confirmed what I already suspected, I'm just not good at creating on the fly in a class. I actually prepared for the class looking for pictures of Wood Cuts on the internet, and I printed out a still life that had some elements I liked, but I really should have taken a completed sketch to work from. Laura gave us 4 design options before setting us loose and one was to just use geometric shapes which would probably have been more successful for me. I do like what I did and will probably continue to work on it.