Emergence from Sinkhole

Last year around this time I started a quilt called Sinkhole. The story of this quilt, why I created it, and why I eventually had to fold it up and put it away has already been told over several posts which you can read here:

And if you read any of those posts, you’ll find that they are all carry the same warning – this is pretty personal stuff. I like to write about it because it helps me process it and work through it, but you may not like knowing so much about me, so feel free to not read this post today.

Here is one of the last photos of this quilt:

On the front, I stitched negative words from my past into the gray rings in silver thread. On the back, I tried to quilt positive words in red thread. Unfortunately the silver showed up far better than the red so the dark, hurtful words always seemed to stand out better.

Yes, I was advised by many people not to stitch out all my negative words onto this quilt, but I did anyway, and I found this to be a very, very helpful and healing experience.

So it wasn’t the dark words that sunk this quilt and ruined the project, I want to be clear on that. It was the issues: pleats caused by baggy fabric over the surface that would never, ever quilt out.

Why did my quilt have these issues?

Quite simply I’ve never appliqued a circle larger than 6 inches before and had no idea that the rings would be so complicated to put together. The first 6 went together pretty good, but the larger the rings got, the more the fabric twisted and contorted.

Fabric is not a stable, solid thing. You can’t think of fabric like paper – flat and easily controlled because it’s much more alive. If you pull on fabric hard from one side, you will distort it. If you layer it together and one layer is baggy and loose, all the layers on top will be baggy and loose.

So quite simply – I did not fully understand the difficulty of the design I’d created. I also choose a pretty difficult way of putting it together – turned edge applique. Combine the two together and add in the fact that I was in a hurry to put the thing together and you get a recipe for a disaster quilt.

The issues in the construction was apparent to me from the minute I put the quilt on my design wall. I could see the baggy, excess fabric. I knew it wasn’t going to quilt out. I decided to try anyway.

So I basted Sinkhole and started quilting out all those negative, dark words. The top began to pleat in places, the baggy fabric lumping up uncontrollably in places. I kept quilting and the issues kept getting worse.

Finally I got all the dark words quilted and found I couldn’t stand to look at that side of the quilt. Not necessarily because of the dark words, but because of the glaring fabric issues rippling over the surface.

So I flipped the quilt over and began quilting the good words in red thread in the opposite rings. Technically these words were affirmations, and though many self help gurus tell us affirmations are a great way to feel great, they really didn’t do much for me. Nothing was going to make that quilt right. The issues were just too overwhelming.

That’s when I got stuck.

I knew I needed to quilt in 3 more lines of positive, happy words. I knew I needed to quilt the background, but I couldn’t work on the quilt without seeing the pleats and baggy, rippling fabric without wanting to throw the whole quilt in the trash.

But all that time and effort! All that fabric and time spent quilting out those words! How could I just throw it all away?!

So I folded Sinkhole up and put it under my sewing table and left it there for the last 8 months. Josh would occasionally mention it – when are you going to finish that quilt and move on?

I would avoid the question, cite my need to create Hot Cast and Forged & Welded, and a million other quilts before I returned to Sinkhole. I was stuck – not wanting to work on it, but also not ready move past it.

Until two weeks ago.

2 weeks ago I posted about the quilter’s block I’ve dealt with this summer. After writing it all out, I went into the studio and started searching for the old quilt design for The Scarlet Letter to make a similar small wallhanging for a friend. I figured it was a good project to pull me out of that funk and back into quilting.

Instead of finding that design, I found an old, large scale drawing of Emergence, a goddess quilt I designed more than 2 years ago.

The original idea was a goddess emerging from a traditional wholecloth quilt. At the time of this sketch, I was neck deep in The Duchess and was pretty sure I never wanted to make another white wholecloth quilt again.

But there was always a problem with the design: the wholecloth the goddess was emerging from. I could never pick a design that felt right or could handle being split in half and still look decent. I folded up the design and put it away, taped the sketch of Emergence to my wall and left it there.

I found this original design and suddenly made a connection – what if Emergence and Sinkhole were somehow combined into one quilt?

That’s when I finally pulled Sinkhole out from under my tables, opened up the design of Emergence and found the two matched up almost perfectly.

But…what about the issues on Sinkhole? How in the world was I going to make the goddess figure and combine it with that problematic quilt?

I took a good long look at Sinkhole and decided the dark words had to go. I sat down with my seam ripper and began to pick out the letters. One hour later, I’d gotten through about 6 letters and decided that was a seriously unproductive use of my time.

I laid the quilt out again and stared at it for 10 minutes. The pleats were still there. The baggy fabric was still there. The dark words were still there. All my nightmares about this quilt were just as bad as I had remembered. Picking out the words wasn’t going to help at all. This quilt was beyond fixable.

So what should I do? Forge ahead and hate the end result? Try to make it work? Throw it away and start over from scratch?

I liked the last idea best, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this quilt, the time I spent on it, all the work and thread and effort, it was all already spent. I couldn’t take back what I’d put into it.

I could just throw it away, or I could try to get one last thing out of this quilt – a positive visual experience.

So this is the end of Sinkhole:

And just in case you couldn’t watch the video, here are a couple photos:

In the end, the quilt was just a thin layer of polyester batting, mostly melted over the backing fabric. The top and all the thread was burned away, and you can see the remnants of the rings.

Now if you’re here and don’t think I’m completely and utterly crazy now, I have to say that this was one of THE MOST positive experiences I’ve had so far. Setting fire to a quilt that bothered me so much, that was full of so much negativity, was really the only thing to do, and I’m very glad I did it.

Burning it, getting rid of it in such an elemental way allowed me to move on immediately. That very night, after hosing the quilt and yard down, I came inside and began working on the new quilt design combining Sinkhole and Emergence together.

Luckily the Sinkhole design had been almost entirely created on the computer. All I had to do was create a new sketch of Emergence, scan it into the computer, then combine the two together.

This is Emergence from Sinkhole:

After creating this design, I couldn’t wait to get started! After a whole summer of quilter’s block, I finally had something that made me want to drop everything and quilt.

Which is exactly what I’ve done over the last two weeks. What I love the most is this quilt has finally pulled me out of the fraidy cat stage and I’m trying new construction techniques that I’ve been wanting to use for more than a year.

I’ll be posting more about the construction techniques I’m using, but for now I’ll leave you with this photo of Emergence from Sinkhole as I left her last night – already the goddess figure is fully quilted with loads and loads of feathers!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day