Trendsetting with Diamond Painting

I learned about diamond painting on a couple of FlossTube channels. I was intrigued and hopped on the Internet right away and ordered a couple of kits. They were very inexpensive coming from China with a 35 business day delivery with free shipping. In fact they arrived in 4.5 weeks.

The first one I opened was 'Butterfly'. I got started right away.

The hard plastic 'diamonds' or 'drills' are actually round with several facets in the top to make them sparkly. The drills are packaged in a long strip and numbered by colour. Some kits come with square, faceted drills.

The plastic strips aren't resealable so I numbered the ziplock bags which I purchased at a dollar store. Each kit comes with an applicator pen, a square of wax, and a little tray with a spout-shaped edge.

These are numbered with the colour number and the kit number.

Each kit is like a cross stitch pattern printed on some type of fabric.  The legend tells you which colour goes where. The image on the fabric is covered with a sticky adhesive which is covered with a clear plastic or wax paper sheet to protect the adhesive. Wax is put on the tip of the drill pen and a single drill is picked up and placed where it should go on the sticky fabric's symbol. There are also drill pens that can pick up several drills at a time. Some videos recommended that blue tack stuff that we used to use to stick posters up on our bedroom or classroom walls. Supposedly it works better than the wax. 

One has to decide where to start and only peel away a small part of the painting to work on at a time. I chose to start on the top left.

Once I got going I couldn't stop! I stayed up WAY too late and finished almost half of it.

Here's the picture of another kit I ordered. However, it is small so the detail won't show up that well. The bigger the better for good detail.

I have lots to do today around the house but hope to get back to this at some point.

Kits are available from Amazon at about 4x the price I paid ordering directly from China. Amazon selection is still pretty limited although the quality of the printed fabric might be better.

LED light sheets can be purchased to illuminate the fabric from behind making the symbols easier to see. I just used my OTT lite from above and had no trouble seeing most symbols. On some kits from other companies, the colours also correspond to DMC colours.

Have a look at a few diamond painting videos on YouTube to see if it is something of interest to you or your family.

Generally, these kits can be ordered in various sizes - the bigger the size, the better the detail. Most can also be ordered as cross stitch kits in 4 formats: counted cross stitch with blank fabric in 11ct and 14ct Aida, and printed cross stitch on 11ct and 14ct. Aliexpress is only one place from which they can be ordered. Just Google 'diamond painting' and have a look.

I predict this will become quite a craze very soon in North America, much like the adult colouring books did. Did you know 30% of all book sales last year were the adult colouring books? That's why you saw them everywhere. Diamond paintings would be a fun family activity at the cottage or when everyone is together - all working on a different corner at a time.

I found it to be very relaxing - quite Zen. Skip even remarked that I seemed quite mellow whilst doing it.

Mark my words - diamond painting will be a new fad very soon.