Cross My Heart

When I was a kid, I loved paint-by-number kits. I remember they always came in three-packs (three paintings of horses, three paintings of lighthouses), and I loved everything about them. I loved the tiny paint-pots, all connected in a little plastic row. I loved stirring up the oil paints with a toothpick, watching the sludgy-looking brown oil stir into the paste and come to vivid life. I loved setting up, setting out newspapers and putting on my “painting shirt” (a flannel shirt my mother agreed to sacrifice, given that oil paints wouldn’t wash out) and feeling artsy. I loved the little paintbrushes, their rubbery-plastic length in my fingers as I dabbed at the tiny spaces designated by the number I was working on. I loved the smell of turpentine in a little jar, its hint of forbidden chemicals and grownup solvents, that I was permitted to use to clean my brushes. I loved hunting out every tiny “#1” spot before I opened paint-pot-#2 and swirled it with a new toothpick and began a new hunt. I absolutely loved the satisfaction of filling in one color after another until the picture emerged, whole and complete, one shade at a time.

I could sit for hours doing paint-by-number (a stillness and patience usually reserved for reading), and I displayed my “paintings” as proudly as if I had actually really painted them myself.

Truth be told, they were worth some amount of pride—not for artistic talent, but as a testament to patience and focus and sense of purpose

When I paint now it’s watercolor, and without numbers, but my love of the paint-by-number process I’ve transferred whole and entire to cross-stitching.

My mom taught me counted cross-stitch when I was a kid, because we weren’t allowed to have empty hands when we watched TV (not that we watched much—it was a reading household—but when we did). In the traditional version, the counted cross-stitch version, you use a pattern laid out on graph paper, with little symbols in the squares to tell you what color-number of thread to use. The traditional version involves lots of counting, as you try to follow the blueprint, and that’s what I grew up doing.

What I’ve discovered, of late, is the cross-stitch “kit” that has the same plan printed right on the cross-stitch fabric, so you don’t have to refer back-and-forth to the blueprint on paper. It’s paint-by-numbers, with thread!

I cross-stitch while we watch TV. I cross-stitch and listen to audiobooks. I still love the filling-in of one color at a time, until the picture is complete. I’m cross-stitching things I have no “use” for—I don’t need to frame them or turn them into pillows. It’s the ACT, rather than the result, that I’m addicted to.

I’ve started tacking them up, unframed, in our guest room—just for a lark, really. It seemed silly to have a dozen pictures folded up in a pile. It’s just as silly to tack them higglety-pigglety on the wall, but I can pretend they have a purpose. If I want to.

Something about this filling-in, color by color, satisfies something deep in me. I don’t know what to call it, but it REALLY likes to cross-stitch.