On... "Red"

“If you can’t see it (the mistake) from a galloping horse, it isn’t there,” I tell my quilting students. I preach the galloping horse theory. A couple of weeks ago in Mexico, a proud student held up her quilt and said, “Your horse, or mine?” I liked that. I need a horse right now, a horse of a different color maybe too. A horse to stand in my kitchen and distract the casual observer from my most recent descent into creativity.
“Humble blocks,” I tell my quilting students, “are what the Amish call their quilted blocks with mistakes in them, because they say only God can make a perfect thing.” I have humble cupboards. You would think that if you take a screw out, and put it back in the same hole, that the cabinet doors would be where they were originally. But, no, not in this scenario. One quarter inch off. And I know my quarter inches. It is fairly evident that God has kept his hands out of my paint bucket as I see smudge after smudge, dried drip after dried drip, scratch after scratch. And just how does the dog get her hair into the paint? The whole kitchen indeed is becoming more and more humble with each stroke or replacement screw.
“Mistakes are an opportunity for creativity,” I tell my quilting students. My kitchen is a mecca for creative opportunities. Last night, my partner in crime, my daughter, Emilynn and I discovered the concealing power of candles. Now, we are working on a camouflage for day light hours.

My dad likes red. I like red. My car is red. My slippers are red. My front door is red. My barn is green, go figure. My favorite dress that I never finished, actually never started, was red. Maybe that should have sufficed my taste buds, but no I salivated for a red kitchen. For years I wanted a classic white kitchen and when we moved in, Mike painted the dark brown cabinets white. Ten years later I am painting the bright white cabinets red. Like a beginner ….oh yes, I have painted before, but that kind of experience is as good as saying that you have sewn on a button as a prerequisite for quilting.

It is like making your first quilt. Nothing matches. Just when you think you are ready to put a cabinet screw back in, there is no electricity. Upon careful yet frustrating inspection, you find that you are not plugged in. You were two minutes ago. Hard to operate a drill or a sewing machine when it is not plugged in. Yes, I could get a rechargeable one, but I am just a novice woodworker, I don’t need the equivalent of a top of the line, computerized sewing machine in my toolbox. It is messy, like quilting too, pins and fabric scraps on the floor are replaced by…cabinet screws and paint spills. I don’t have enough fabric, I mean paint.

“Primer?” I had repeated back to the paint store guy. He told me that I should have been told about this when I had bought the paint, 7 coats earlier. He gave me a gallon of free primer. I could use it on the one cabinet I had not yet started. About coat number 5, we decided that we might just like the mottled look.
We started to laugh, Emilynn and I. Getting punchy. We had two hours till the family reunited again and the idea was that the kitchen would be done. Ta Da! Kind of a “while you were out” thing. It has become kind of a “Get out of the house one more time thing.”
We had painted when the house was quiet, in other words when my husband was out of town, and when the boys were away at activities. The same times you might enjoy quilting. We are into the 4th week on this little project. It was supposed to take one week. We need a Paint-in-a-Day method!

As we put up the doors, anxious to see the finished work, we see all the spots that need work, like the intersections that don’t match. If it were small like a quilting project we could pack it up and go to an UFO group – UnFinished Objects group.

Emilynn and I stepped back to try to see the kitchen as a whole, not as a union of humble errors. We looked and looked. After a few minutes, Emilynn got out the candles. We had a great evening talking about our time together painting, the philosophy of quilting, and the possibility of buying a horse.

You can see the red kitchen too, but bring a swift horse.