Design concept

MIGRATION #2 is about what I imagine it would feel like to fly along with a flock of migrating birds. Since they are birds of the imagination, they don't represent any particular species. Standing in my garden on my farm in Northern Illinois, I can see vast expanses of sky. Almost every day there are flocks of birds passing overhead, migrating, or just traveling together from one pond to the next. To me, the idea of flight represents the ultimate feeling of freedom.

Design, process and technical details

In December of 1994 I decided to design a large quilt which would incorporate elements of my whole cloth series along with string piecing and appliqué. The outlines of the birds were drawn on paper and scanned into the computer as bitmaps. They were traced using a program called streamline, which converted them to vector drawings (objects that could be manipulated and colored)  in Corel Draw, my computer drawing program.

Here's the final color study as it looked on my computer screen. The fill in the center square is actually a bitmap made from a slide of one of my painted fabrics. The fill in the outer border is a standard Corel Draw fill that I altered to look like one of my painted fabrics. I intended to have triangles in the sweeping curves, but I didn't feel it was necessary to draw each one in the sketch, so I just flushed in a stock, geometric texture fill to see if the idea would work.

I printed the line drawing onto acetate and projected it onto a large piece of paper to enlarge it to the finished size. The paper became the templates for cutting the fabric. Once I finished piecing the top, I decided to quilt some long feathered plumes intertwined with the sweeping curves.

I knew that these would become major design elements so I went back to the computer and drew the center lines of the plumes and projected them onto the quilt top, and marked the lines with pencil.

The line drawings of the 21 birds were Xeroxed onto wonder under, which had been fused to black fabric.

In the lower right corner, the birds are larger - about ten inches long. As they fly diagonally across the painted sky, they become smaller and smaller, until in the outer border they're only about 3-4 inches long.

The center fabric was painted with fiber reactive dye in an expressionistic design, incorporating the pure colors of light. The outer border fabric was painted in the greens, browns and lavenders of earth.

In the sweeping graduated curves, I have pieced a variation on the traditional "Flying Geese" pattern. In this variation, the "Geese" fly in a path that is graduated in both size and color, and curves around the outer border.    A  fabric painted in striated rainbow hues was used to make the center triangles in . 

In each triangle I quilted the outline of a bird.  I designed one symmetrical bird on my computer, then stretched and skewed it in over a hundered different shapes and sizes to get a bird that would fit in each of the triangles. Here are just a few of the variations.

On the back of the quilt is another original variation on "Flying Geese" in the form of one large 72" radially symmetrical block. The bobbin threads in the machine quilting echo the colors of the top threads, and mirror the flying bird design on the front of the quilt.

Click for larger view

Exhibitions and Awards:

• Permanent collection of The National Quilt Museum of the United States
• MID-ATLANTIC QUILT FESTIVAL, 1995 (juried) Williamsburg, PA FIRST PLACE
  
• COLUMBUS HERITAGE QUILT SHOW, 1995, Columbus, IN
  
• QUILTERS HERITAGE CELEBRATION, 1995, (juried) Lancaster, PA
  
• AMERICAN QUILTERS SOCIETY SHOW, 1995, (juried) Paducah, KY BEST OF SHOW
  
• SPECTRUM: THE TEXTILE ART OF CARYL BRYER FALLERT 1983-1995, Museum of the American Quilters Society, Paducah, KY 1986
• Caryl Bryer Fallert: A Retrospective, New England Quilt Museum, Lowell, MA, August 20 - October 31, 2015
• A Life in Color: 50-year Retrospective Solo Exhibition, National Quilt Museum, Paducah, KY, March 14-October 7, 2025

Publications

• THE PADUCAH SUN, April 27, 1995, p. 1 A
  
• THE COURIER-JOURNAL, Louisville, KY April 28, p. B 2
  
• THE EVANSVILLE PRESS, April 28 1995, p.7
  
• REGION MESSENGER-INQUIRER, Owensboro, KY Friday, April 28, 1995
  
• QUILTERS NEWSLETTER MAGAZINE, 1995 July-Aug. p.8
  
• ART QUILT MAGAZINE, 1995: Issue #3, pp. 23 & 40
  
• AMERICAN QUILTER MAGAZINE, Fall, 1995, FRONT AND BACK COVERS & pp. 3, 28,29
  
• PATCHWORK QUILT SENKA, #31, Autumn 1995, p.78
  
• LADY'S CIRCLE PATCHWORK QUILTS, 1996: January, pp. 3, 24, 25
  
• CARYL BRYER FALLERT: A SPECTRUM OF QUILTS, 1983-1995, 1996, AQS Books, pp. 92, 93, 94, 95
  
• AMERICAN QUILTERS SOCIETY SHOW POSTER, 1996, AQS
  
• AMERICAN QUILTERS SOCIETY WALL CALENDAR, 1996, AQS (COVER)
  
• AQS SHOW POSTCARD, 1996, AQS
  
• NORTHEAST QUILTS UNLIMITED,  1997 Arts Center of Old Forge, Show Catalog (COVER)
  
• THE QUILT: Beauty in Fabric & Thread, 1997: Salazar / Feiedman/Fairfax p. 124
  
• OPTICAL ILLUSIONS FOR QUILTERS, Karen Combs, AQS 1997, p. 21
  
• TRADITIONAL QUILTER, 1997: Golden 50th Issue, p. 37
  
• QUILTERS NEWSLETTER MAGAZINE, 1999 September, p.25
• SANTE ET MIGRATION: F O R M A T I O N C O N T I N U E 0 9 L A U S A N N E ORGANISATION: Policlinique Médicale Universitaire Promotional- brochure for a medical conference in Switzerland 2009
• BOUNDARIES IN MOTION: Rethinking Contemporary Migration Events: 2009, Hofirek, Klvanova, Nekorjak, Centre fro the Study of Democracy and Culture COVER
• 4 Her, Kentucky Publishing Inc. Spring 2010, pp. 16-17
• COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL QUILT MUSEUM, AQS 2009, p. 60
• American Quilters Society 25th Anniversary Show Poster, 2009
• AQS Catalogue of Show Quilts, 2019: Spring, p. 113, 115