Color Bars Class and Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry

What an exciting week! It started off with the birth of a new great-grandson in Dallas on Saturday, Tucker Knox Kuykendall. Then Wednesday I teach my Color Bars class here in Hattiesburg. On Thursday I drive to Oxford (250 mi) to attend the Reception and gallery talk of CARYL BRYER FALLERT-GENTRY: 40 YEARS OF COLOR, LIGHT, & MOTION, a 58-quilt retrospective opening at the University Museum at Ole Miss. Woo-hoo!

Color Bars is an improvisational way of creating art quilts and I love to make these and teach the class. For people who have always worked from a pattern, this free-form way of cutting and stitching can be called "permission to do your own thing and ignore the quilt police." I am inspired by the works of Rayna Gillman, Dianne S. Hire, and Kathy Loomis, and there are many quilters today who enjoy these techniques.

Color Bars #2--Black

When I first saw Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry's quilts in Houston in the 1980s I became her fan. Her Corona #2: Solar Eclipse that won Best of Show in Paducah in 1989 is my all-time favorite quilt and is a part of the permanent collection of the Museum of the American Quilter's Society. It is also pictured in The Twentieth Century's Best American Quilts.

Corona #2: Solar Eclipse by Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry

Caryl has many pictures and full description of how she created this masterpiece on her website.