Create

This lovely rock used to belong to a dear friend of mine. She was an amazing lady and I only wish we'd known each other longer. She was a journalist for our local paper when I knew her but had lived a rich and creative life in all parts of the world long before we met . This rock used to sit outside her apartment and her daughter (also a dear friend) gave it to me both as a way to remember her mother and as a promise for my future.

The rock has been sitting in my bedroom for the last year and a half. I look at it every day - sometimes it fills me with energy and other times it mocks me a little. I think I'm trying to make myself worthy of having received such a gift.

The big creative projects that I'm currently working on are still works in progress and I'm not sure I've made much progress recently which can get discouraging so sometimes creativity needs a little instant gratification which explains my kitchen beautification project.

I'm not particularly fond of my kitchen cabinets. The cabinets themselves are plain and they are painted orange...the walls of the kitchen are painted orange too. Not that I'm not fond of orange...well, actually, I'm not. I know that it's some people's favorite color but it's not mine. Oh, it goes well with the green accents in the other parts of the house (I do like green) but there's just a little too much orange for me so I've decided to liven it up a bit without having to repaint the whole kitchen.

A few days ago I got the creative idea to stencil something onto the cabinets to work with the orange but also draw my attention away from it. I wish I could paint freehand but my art always looks like a 3 year old did it so that's out of the question. Stenciling, however, is something I can do. I once stenciled a rose border in our master bedroom in Virginia and it looked lovely. It had better have looked lovely, it took days to do and my arms were really sore plus I'm not really fond of ladders.

Of course that bedroom thing was almost 20 years ago (when I was 5) and stencils don't seem to be as popular now as they were then. I had a heck of a time finding something but finally good old Martha Stewart came to the rescue.

Projects are always more involved than you think they will be when you conceive the idea but at least this one only required some paint and a couple of sponge brushes. I decided to get fancy and use 2 different shades of green for the stem and leaves.




And here's the final result

Well, it's not the final final result because there's a whole lot more cabinet to paint and there are at least 10 more cabinet doors in the kitchen but this was my test run to see if I liked the idea on the cabinet as much as I did in my head and guess what - I do! I think it adds that extra something that the plain doors are missing while giving the kitchen that 1930s cottage look I love.

Today I made my rock proud.