As someone who just went through this, I had a similar experience. I was on contract through January. January comes around and I figure I'll have a gig no problem. As a front-end developer, I already had recruiters knocking down my door.

A month later, I finally landed a gig. I had a few offers, but over the course of a month, I had more frustration with people I was interviewing. Three places I interviewed with weren't looking for a front-end guy, they were looking for a Javascript programmer (my goal wasn't to write JS 7 hours a day - sorry). Also, I had several instances where the company had no idea what they were looking for. One company said they wanted someone who did a lot of server sided Javascript (node.js and backbone.js) as well as being a great designer. Seriously? WTF?

I agree that most of the interviews I excelled at, was where I got up and showed the company the app I just helped build. As opposed the the "code quizzes" a lot of places now use. I actually stopped a guy in one interview who kept asking me basic CSS stuff and said, "Did you even look at the sites in my portfolio or my personal site I built?"

All in all, it was very frustrating and I felt like I really had to go way out my way to try and convince people of my skill level. At other times, I was trying to pry out of them what they were really looking for.