Pacific International Quilt Festival XXI

I spent much of this weekend at this year’s Pacific International Quilt Festival held in Santa Clara, CA. It’s an annual mecca of quilters and fabric artists, displaying over 800 quilts and quilted art objects. The sheer volume of materials both in the competition and for sale is overwhelming and it took me two trips to see most, but not all, of what PIQF had to offer.

I’ll spend a couple blog posts on this because I’d love to show you samples of how awesome the quilts on display were! First off, a quilt designed and made by the husband of one of my daughter’s terrific teachers, Miss Sue. His name is Bret Young and this is called “Meta” – I think it was inspired by “QR codes” that have been popping up on ads everywhere, which can be read by smartphones:

Of course there’s a huge range in the quilts on display from traditional, to modern, to innovative, to really cool figurative work. I’ll focus here on some of those landscape and figurative art quilts and save the rest for another post.

One of the most interesting pieces to me was a four-piece quilted version of a Wayne Thiebaud painting, “River and Farms,” which I recall seeing in a local museum. This work by Donna Brennan, Jenny K. Lyon, Anita Marshall, and Margo Wilson is stunning– it captures the colors and landscape view very well, and also employs three-dimensional yarns, threads and pieces that leap off the surface:

I saw several great ocean quilts. I enjoyed this one, Turtle Sea by Rusty Brockman (a closeup of the turtle too!):

And here are a sampling of a few other figurative art quilts that I admired:

“Here’s Looking at You,” Elizabeth T. Ward

“Hippo Love,” Janet Fogg

“Brian the Basilisk,” Jane Haworth

“Flooded,” Tanya Brown

“Mermaid Magic,” Donna Blum

“Down and Away Below,” Ruth De Bord (close-up)

“The World,” Rachel Wetzler

close-up from “The World”

“Stripe,” Janet Fogg

“At First Light,” 6-panel image of Portland by Tigard, OR, quilters

“If I Had a Princess,” Alexandra Von Burg

“Great Blue Herons,” Joanne Baeth

And finally here, I will share with you a work I’ve been admiring in book form for a while, which I got to see in person: Kay Mackenzie’s “Lollipop Grove”:

A tree close-up:

So very charming. I’ve been working with her book to make some crazy-patched hearts for applique…

So you can see that PIQF offered lots of inspiration and truly fantastic quilt art. More photos coming soon!