Well the really big news is that I have remarried. After six years as a widow, I decided that being alone was not what I wanted for the rest of my life. A year ago, I was lucky enough to meet and fall in love with a wonderful, kind, brilliant man named Ron Gentry. We have spent almost every day together since April of last year, and on January 11, 2013 we were married in a private ceremony held at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah. The museum hung my quilt "Migration #2" in the main gallery in December and, since Ron and I are now migratory humans, (spending half our time in Paducah and half in Port Townsend, WA) we chose the museum, and this quilt as the backdrop for our ceremony.

For our wedding slide show, click here. It's an 11M PDF file, so be patient if you have a slow connection. Click on the little icon with arrows pointing in all four directions to get the whole picture on your screen, and use the arrow keys on your computer keyboard to go forward and backward so the control bar doesn’t cover up the captions. You can also click on the thumbnails below to see some of the pictures one at a time.

SO WHO IS THIS GUY ANYWAY???
Ron (Dr. William Ronald Gentry) spent 35 years as a research scientist and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Physics at the University of Minnesota (10 years as head of the department). Before that, he was raised in Arkansas, attended college at The University of Redlands (CA), Ph.D - U.C. Berkeley, post-doc MIT. He retired to Port Townsend, WA (It's at the entrance to Puget Sound on the Olympic Peninsula) in 2000, with trips back to Minneapolis for one semester a year until 2005. Ron's wife, of 47 years, died two years ago after a long illness. Ron loves to travel, loves art, and loves me. He is also an amateur photographer, gourmet cook, boating enthusiast, and film buff. He is currently learning to ballroom dance.  

As you can see from the header (above) I have officially changed my name to Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry.

Ron and I will be splitting our time between Paducah, Kentucky and Port Townsend, Washington, where we have set up a second quilting studio in Ron's home on the cliffs overlooking Puget Sound. Click the thumbnails below for pictures of Bryerpatch Studio West.

In 2012, Ron and I drove cross-country five times, commuting between our Paducah and Port Townsend homes. We call ourselves river-coastal.

SO HOW DID THE TWO OF YOU MEET?
Well, the likelihood of a scientist from Port Townsend and a busy artist from Paducah meeting by chance is pretty remote. The only place our paths might have crossed was Asilomar, where (coincidentally) both of us have taught. So we met the modern, scientific way... on eHarmony.

Ron went to New Zealand and Australia for six weeks in February and March, and we Skyped and exchanged pictures almost every day. He showed me sunsets in Tonga and I showed him my latest work in the studio. He immediately loved Dancing Through the Blues #2, and reserved it for his personal collection.

Ron was brave enough to come back to Paducah for quilt show week in April, when nine women were living with us and helping in the shop. They soon discovered that if they got up early enough, they would find Ron in the kitchen making individual gourmet omelets or sour cream pancakes.

In anticipation of summer in Port Townsend, in a much smaller studio, I spent the winter making ten quilt tops. I didn't even remove the paper templates from the backs. It takes four days to drive from Paducah to Port Townsend, plenty of time to remove paper from ten quilt tops. We set up the PT studio for quilting, and by the end of the summer, all of the quilts were finished, plus four new pieces, completed entirely at Bryerpatch Studio West. Click here to see the 2012 quilts.

This was a year of speed-limit birthdays for both of us.

In June Ron and I left Paducah with a big load of studio supplies and drove to PT. Along the way, we met my sister Pat Howell and her husband Rich at a resort in Coeur d'Alene, ID and celebrated my 65th birthday (yep!! I'm officially a senior citizen now.) with dinner and a cruise on the lake.

By early September we were back in P.T. where I had exactly a month to finish my quilting projects (mentioned above).
We headed back to Paducah again in early October, stopping on the way for visit with my niece Becky and her family in Corvalis Oregon.

November brought another class at the Bryerpatch Studio, my last for a while. With the exception of two sessions at Asilomar in February and March, I will be taking a sabbatical from teaching for the rest of 2013 while I finish the quilts for my solo exhibition.

Over the holidays we visited again with Ron's family in Arkansas, and then served dinner on Christmas day (venison pot-roast and turkey with cornbread stuffing) to twenty-five neighbors and friends in Paducah. We also hosted the annual New Years Day Lowertown neighborhood game day and chili potluck.

In November Ron asked me to marry him, and I said yes. We announced our engagement officially at the neighborhood Thanksgiving Dinner at Etcetera Coffee House and Ron bought me a beautiful ring to commemorate our engagement.

After our wedding on January 11, we took a week-long honeymoon to Savannah GA, where we visited Alden and Karin Mead (former U. of Minnesota collegues of Ron's) and my niece Sam Bryer (recent MFA at Savannah College of Art and Design). On the way, we spent a day at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, and on the way home we had a wonderful visit with Bob and Barbara Hunter, who gave us the grand tour of their fabulous collection of western art.