Sinkhole

Started Fall 2010, Destroyed Fall 2011

Sinkhole is a quilt started soon after Shadow Self in the fall of 2010. It was intended to capture all the negative words of my past, words spoken to me by my dysfunctional, alcoholic mother and sisters. Needless to say, this was an intensely difficult and painful quilt to create.

Throughout the process, I blogged occasionally about the process of making this quilt and journey of emotion it took me through. You can read the posts in order below:

Designing Sinkhole	Creating 3D Effects	Physics of the Quest
A Turning Point	Diving Back into Sinkhole	Sinkhole Journey
	Emergence from Sinkhole

Basically Sinkhole became too dark, too negative, too destructive. After stitching on 12 lines of terrible words, I simply couldn't look at the quilt any longer. I folded the quilt up for many months and tried to forget about it.

Finally I realized that it wasn't going to magically disappear on its own and I'd need to do something about it. I pulled it out and looked at it long and hard, wondering if it could potentially be used in a portion of a new goddess quilt called Emergence.

Even this use seemed impossible due to the rippling and issues the quilt had developed during piecing. Finally I just decided the best possible thing for this quilt was to get rid of it. That's what this video is all about:

Click Here if the video does not appear

After burning Sinkhole, this is all that remained:

Do I regret making this quilt? Absolutely not.

The time and energy I used working on this quilt was wasted, but not in a bad way. Working on the quilt allowed me to think about things that had happened in the past and to work them out. It helped me to look critically at my family and myself and find realizations that I couldn't have connected otherwise.

We all have pain in our lives. There will always be those people that hurt us, whether intentionally or unintentionally. We can also hurt those we love the most.

Sinkhole was a quilt that represented this pain and the damage it can cause if left to continue. Many cycles existed in my family growing up: alcoholism, dysfunction, passive aggression, open aggression, and abuse. The rings represented those cycles and by destroying the quilt and those rings, I effectively ended those cycles.

To capture this transition of my life and all that it meant to me, I used the same Sinkhole symbolism in the base of Emergence, but this time did not quilt it with words, only gray thread.

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