Latch hooking is one of those crafts that’s always intrigued me. I always walk past the colourful kits in craft stores, as the large kits are pricey, and the smaller kit designs are more child-focused – think cute puppies and cartoon flowers – and I want a design I’ll like if I’m going to invest my time in making something!

I thought latch hooking would be a good addition to try for my Relaxing Crafts series, so I hunted around and finally found a kit with a beautiful design that spoke to me: plumeria flowers on a rocky beach.

What is Latch Hooking?

Latch hooking is a little like cross stitch – you have a pattern made of coloured squares, and a canvas you work stitches into. But instead of making a stitch for each square, you have a short length of yarn that you tie onto the canvas with a latch hook. I’ve used latch hooks before for machine knitting, and of course working with a hook is second nature to me from crochet!

In a kit, the yarn is bundled into pre-cut strands of each colour, so you don’t need to cut endless little pieces of yarn:

The advice, as with cross stitch, is to start from the middle of the design, in the centre of the canvas, and work out from there.

That’s a good way to make sure the design is centred on your fabric, but I ended up regretting that decision (more on that later…)

How to Latch Hook

The instructions I found online all said to latch each strand of yarn in a one-step motion: wrap the centre of a yarn strand around the hook below the latch, insert the hook under a bar in the canvas, wrap both ends of the strand into the latch, and pull through:

I found it fiddly having to use my non-dominant hand (that’s my right hand, as I’m left-handed) to do all that wrapping. Instead, I treated the latch hook more like a crochet hook, and did a two-step process:

Step 1: Insert the hook under a bar in the canvas, grab the centre of the yarn strand with the hook (below left), and pull the hook back through. Push the hook forward until the yarn sits behind the open latch on the hook (below, right).

Step 2: Grab both yarn ends with the hook, and pull it back through the loop on the hook – the latch will close around the yarn ends as you pull the hook back (below, left), which makes it very easy.

As you can see by comparing the result (above, right) with the photo from the one-step process, with the two-step process the yarn is latched on in the opposite direction (i.e. ‘upside-down’), but that doesn’t matter at all – there isn’t a right or wrong way to attach the strands of yarn, provided you attach them all in the same way. So that’s my top tip for crocheters: use your latch hook like a crochet hook and grab the yarn with the hook instead of manipulating the yarn around and into the hook with your other hand!

Whichever method you use, the end result is a beautiful, plush fabric like a rug.

My Review

The hook that came with my kit was a bit thin and not very comfortable to use, so I invested in a more ergonomic Boye latch hook that has a soft comfort grip that fits my hand well, and an offset head that keeps your hand further from your work. Buying a better hook was well worth it – you’ll be spending hours and hours hooking even a small project, so there’s no point in suffering!

L: cheap hook, R: ergonomic hook

I found the process of latch hooking to be relaxing, but working the right-hand side of my canvas was a bit frustrating, as the yarn I’d already hooked into place kept getting in my way. As I’m left-handed, I found it much faster to hook from right to left, which meant I only had blank canvas beneath my hand. As I started in the middle, the half of the canvas I worked from left to right (away from the middle) was much more of a slog than the half I worked in the more natural (to me) direction.

It’s much easier to work from the side where your hook isn’t blocked by the stitches you’ve already made!

In future, if I make another latch hook project I think I’d mark the centre stitch, and then count my pattern carefully up and across from the centre to the top right corner and start from there. That way, I could work left and down across the canvas to the bottom left corner, and always have blank canvas beneath my hand as I work, so the previously worked stitches wouldn’t get in the way of my hook.

Right-handers: if you want to try this method you’d start at the top left corner and work right and down to the bottom right corner! 

To speed up the process of selecting yarn strands, I ended up counting and pulling all the strands I’d need for a small area (10-20 stitches) at once, lay them all down on the project, and then I could easily grab the next one from the pile without having to pull them individually from the plastic wrappers for each stitch. This definitely helped me feel like I was making faster progress.

Once I realised how much easier the left side was for me, I forced myself to finish the entire right side before I was allowed to start on the left side, and I’m glad I did! As I suspected, it was much faster when I got to the left side, and the project became much more enjoyable. I zoomed through hooking the left side, and finally had a completed project:

Isn’t it pretty?

Relaxing Craft Verdict

Latch hooking definitely qualifies as a relaxing craft! Once you’ve mastered the technique, it’s just counting the pattern squares and hooking each strand into place – lovely and restful. And if you can find a design you like (there are some tempting latch hook kit designs on amazon!), it’s a nice way to pass the time and keep your hands occupied without having to think too hard about what you’re doing.

Comparing latch hooking with other crafts where you also follow a gridded pattern, I think I prefer diamond painting and cross stitch – with either of those crafts, once you’ve prepared one colour of diamond or threaded one length of floss, you can make dozens of squares of that colour without stopping. With latch hooking, you need to stop and pick up a new piece of yarn for every square, so I found it to be a slower process. But I get bored with any of these crafts after a while, and when that happens I like to mix it up by switching to a different relaxing craft!

I really like my finished project (although I’m tempted to pull out the flower centres and rework them in the dark brown instead of the grey) but… what do you do with a latch hooked piece? I feel that the yarn may be too soft to use it as a functional rug, but I’d like to be able to do something with this piece though (for reference, it’s about 20×12″/50x30cm). If you have any ideas, please let me know!

Have you ever tried latch hooking? Or are you tempted to try it now? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Before we begin: ARTDOT provided these products to me for review, and set up an affiliate account for me, but I’m not being compensated for this review, and, as always, my opinions are my own!

Do you take time off over the holidays to relax and decompress? I love to stay home and do jigsaw puzzles or relaxing crafts while the TV plays in the background.

One of the crafts I’m still enjoying is diamond painting (see my posts from last year), and when ARTDOT approached me about a collaboration, I saw that some of their products looked like they’d be really useful, so I’ve been testing them out in preparation for my holiday crafting sessions!

These are multi-purpose products, so do take a look even if you aren’t into diamond painting – the storage products would also work for beading or other small craft supplies, and the light pad is perfect for tracing designs onto paper or fabric. And I have a special discount code for you at the end of this post!

Storage Case

This is the Diamond Painting Storage Case. I got the medium size – it also comes in smaller and larger sizes, and in a colourful pink patterned version if you don’t love the smart black and purple option.

It’s a nice sturdy zippered case, and I love that purple!

To test it out, I picked up a small diamond painting kit from amazon to play with and decanted all the diamonds using the provided silicone funnel.

Tip: Although I found the funnel useful for this initial step, once you’re working with your diamonds you can tip them straight back into their jar from the tray.

I’m really impressed with this case – it has a convenient screw-topped jar to store each colour, and they’re all mounted in a custom foam base so they don’t get mixed up and out of order!

You can store your pen, tray, spare wax and other accessories in the mesh pocket inside the case lid, so it’s a convenient and portable solution to keep all your accessories together.

Tip: Although the colours and symbols will be different for each kit you buy, the key should always have numbers, so by labelling your containers with the numbers you can reuse them for future kits without having to change the labels!

The storage bag also came with stickers to label the jars, and the above set of bonus diamond painting accessories – I don’t need all the included items, but I really like the extra-large tray!

Tip: I bought myself a couple of fancy resin diamond painting pens from amazon as I find the larger handle much more comfortable to use, but despite trying several fancy expensive tips, the best tips I’ve found are the ones that come on these cheap pink pens! So don’t throw those pens away when you get one with a kit or accessory – pop out the tip and you’ll have spares for your fancy pen handle!

Light Pad

This is the Light Pad For Diamond Painting (although it’s actually a multi-purpose crafting item – I’m also going to use it for tracing punchneedle patterns onto fabric, and I’m sure it has multiple other crafting uses!)

I got the A3 size (that’s ~17×13″, it’s massive!) – it’s also available in both smaller and larger sizes, and the smaller A4 one (~14×10″) would be fine for most needs.

The light pad comes with a stand and binder clips, so you can clip your work directly to it and use it in a more vertical position like an artist’s easel, if that works for you. It also comes with the same accessories (pens, trays, wax etc) as my storage bag above, and a diamond storage box with little flip-top containers.

I can’t believe how thin this light pad is – it just looks like a sheet of acrylic, and is barely thicker than the USB socket! The website says it’s over an inch thick, but that measurement must include the stand – I measured the pad and it’s only 3mm (1/16″) thick. But it really works – it uniformly lights up the surface and has three levels of brightness.

Storage Drawers

And finally, these are the Stackable Diamond Painting Storage (Square Bottle). I got 4 drawers, but you can buy them in smaller or larger quantities too, and each drawer clips to the others horizontally or vertically so you can build a custom storage system of any size.

I’ve had a large diamond painting in progress for a long time, and this (below) was my diamond-storage solution up till now – all the colours were in ziplock bags and arranged by number in a box (apart from the large bags, which wouldn’t fit). But the bags are starting to break after repeated opening and closings, and I’ve had to double up bags in some of the compartments because my box only has 30 spaces and I have 45 colours:

Before: not ideal! All these diamonds are now neatly organised in the storage drawers above.

These storage drawers make wrangling all those colours so much easier! You can choose to buy the drawers with either the round bottles I showed you in the storage case above, or these small rectangular tic-tac-style bottles:

I chose the rectangular bottles as they’re perfect for large kits with small quantities of many colours. Just be aware that the opening in the lid of the tic-tac box is so small that you have to pull off the entire lid of the box each time you fill it, so the flip-top lid is only useful for tipping out the diamonds into the tray, not replacing them after you use them.

UPDATE: The tic-tac boxes work perfectly without removing the lid if you use a standard-sized diamond tray! It’s just the extra large tray pictured above that they aren’t great with. Now I keep the extra large tray for the black diamonds (there are soooo many in my project!) and I’m completely satisfied with using the tic-tac boxes with a regular tray for all the other colours – this setup makes swapping between colours easy and fast.

If you don’t need that many bottles, I’d suggest getting the version with the round screw top bottles – you only get 32 bottles instead of 35 in each drawer, but I think I prefer the round ones.

Tip: Although this product also comes with a silicone funnel, I found it easier to fill the containers directly and skip the funnel.

My Experience

Part 1: Sofa Crafting

I clipped my small diamond painting directly to the light pad. The pad is thin and light, but perfectly sturdy, so I can easily work on my lap on the sofa without any additional support. It’s easy to see the canvas, even in low light when I’m watching TV at night.

I’m using the lowest of the 3 brightness settings, and I love how this is bright enough to clearly see what I’m doing without lighting up the whole room. There’s plenty more power available if you need brighter backlighting for your project.

Look how easy it is to see my project without straining, even at night:

This painting is just a cheap kit I picked up from Amazon – the picture reminded me of the best parts of my time in Africa…

And I unreservedly love this storage case! It’s so convenient to have all my tools to hand and be able to put everything away neatly in seconds when I’ve finished crafting.

I don’t really trust flip-top containers when I’m crafting on the sofa – if I got distracted and a lid popped open, I’d have diamonds everywhere. This is my perfect sofa-crafting solution: the screw-top jars feel very secure, and each jar is held securely by the foam base so they don’t roll around inside the case.

I think Maggie approves too!

That’s my cozy holiday evening crafting sorted – thumbs up all around.

Part 2: Desk Crafting

And now to my big diamond painting! For my birthday last year (well over a year ago now) I received a huge 2x3ft (60x90cm) diamond painting canvas. But I’d only finished a small fraction before it became impossible to work on while sitting on the sofa – you can’t roll up the parts you’ve already completed, so it was getting larger and more unwieldy as I unrolled more of the canvas.

I cleared a desk in my studio as a dedicated crafting space and laid out my canvas there, but I’ve struggled to tell some of the symbols apart when there wasn’t full daylight streaming into the room, so I have to admit that my beautiful painting has languished, mostly untouched, for months.

But now, all that is solved! Slipping the slim LED light pad underneath my canvas makes it so much easier to see the symbols I’m working with.

Light off. The symbols are the squares where I have yet to place a diamond.

Light on! And – bonus – look how easy it is to spot if you’ve missed a diamond (compare the individual symbols near the bottom right with the same area in the previous pic)!

The storage drawers are very handy if you want to keep lots of small materials you need regularly to hand, in a dedicated workspace. In general, I think the portable case is a more versatile choice, but these drawers let me store a lot of colours in a very small space on my diamond painting desk, so they’re perfect for a long-term project like this.

Tip: I’ve taped a printout of the key to my diamond painting just in front of the drawers, so it’s easy to grab the right diamond colour without needing to consult the key printed at one edge of the canvas.

As the tic-tac style bottles are so small, I’ve had to use multiple bottles for a few of the most numerous colours. But I have more bottles than I need, so that’s fine. It’ll be nice to just grab a spare bottle of #3 (black – there’s always so much black!) when I run out instead of having to decant more diamonds from the larger bag!

And oooh, look, my painting is starting to look like something (it’s only about 1/4 done!)…

In case you’re wondering, this is an officially licenced version of a painting I love, Farewell to Anger by Leonid Afremov.

I wanted it large so I could hang it on the wall when it was finished, and so the detail wouldn’t get lost, but I lost momentum when I couldn’t easily work on the project. Now I’m excited to get back to it and make some progress – I love seeing all the colours developing, and it’s so much easier to work now I have all my diamonds conveniently at hand and can see the symbols clearly without straining!

Buying Info – and a Special Discount!

I hope you found this review useful. I definitely recommend getting a light pad and a proper storage solution for your diamond paintings – it makes the world of difference. And I can recommend any of these ARTDOT products – the quality is good and they’re very reasonably priced (and are all currently on sale too!)

All the ARTDOT products I reviewed here are available (and highly-rated) on amazon, but for the best prices you can buy them directly from ARTDOT with free shipping & fast delivery within 2-5 business days to the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Netherland, Spain, Belgium, and Australia.

You get reward points with every purchase, and ARTDOT are offering PlanetJune readers an additional 10% off your order – just go to ARTDOT and enter code JUNE at checkout. Enjoy! 🙂

Have you seen this novelty loop yarn in stores? It’s designed to be finger-knit with no tools – you just pull one loop through the next.

Working straight gives you a standard knitted fabric, and crossing pairs of loops before you ‘knit’ them lets you make pretty stitch patterns.

I picked up a bargain bundle of this Bernat Blanket Alize Blanket EZ from the yarn factory outlet store as part of my quest to find relaxing crafts to try. (And yes, this is the wrong time of year to be making a cozy blanket, but I have air conditioning, so it’s not that bizarre…)

Choosing a Pattern

Once you know what you’re doing, you can probably adapt many knitting patterns for this type of yarn, but I’d recommend starting out by choosing a pattern that’s designed especially for loop yarn.

I chose my favourite pattern, Yarnspirations’ Diamond Lattice Blanket, and looked up other projects on Ravelry to see what other people thought of it. Based on the feedback of a few other ravelers, I started by forming a starting chain so the bottom of the blanket would match the cast-off edge, and pulled up a row of plain knit stitches in the back bumps of the chain before beginning the lattice pattern, to give a straighter bottom edge.

This pattern says it’s rated as ‘experienced’ skill level, and I agree with that assessment. I wouldn’t jump into this as your first loop knitting project like I did unless you really like a challenge. (Luckily, I do!)

As others had noted in their project notes, the pattern is extremely wordy and not clear to follow. I decided to just ignore the pattern directions after the first row, and figure it out myself based on watching where the slanted crossed stitches should go next. I got a bit confused at the edges at first, but apart from that it was fairly straightforward, thanks to my experience with crossed stitches in knitting. Again, I wouldn’t recommend this specific pattern unless you’re familiar with loop knitting and/or regular knitting with crossed stitches.

Loop Knitting: The Process

Loop knitting is actually a little more difficult than I’d imagined it would be:

• As you never turn the work, you work left to right for one row and right to left for the next, so each hand has to do different things on odd and even rows.
• It’s definitely a two-handed craft – crossing loops with one hand while finding the next loop of the working yarn with the other keeps you on your toes!

Crossing a pair of stitches

Upsides

Although the in-progress project looks like a knitter’s nightmare – just like you’ve dropped all your stitches off the needles! – the textured yarn holds the loops in place well, so the stitches are fairly secure. It even takes a bit of effort to frog these stitches if you make a mistake, so stitches unravelling by mistake doesn’t seem to be a problem.

The yarn is very soft and feels nice to work with (if you’re familiar with plush chenille super bulky blanket yarns, it’s like a looped version of an extra thick one). As each stitch is large, it works up quickly and the resulting fabric is extremely thick and plush – I’d never use this yarn and technique to make anything other than a cozy blanket.

Downsides

I discovered a major problem with using this kind of yarn: as you never turn the work, you don’t see the back until you’ve finished (or stop and flip it over). That wouldn’t be a problem, except that it’s very easy to skip a loop in your working yarn without noticing, so you keep going blissfully along with no problem until the end of your session when you fold up your work and see this:

Noooo!

A big loop on the back of the work! The only solutions at this point are:

• Cut the loop off (which should be just as safe as starting a new ball of looped yarn – there’s just a tiny nub of plain yarn at the end of each ball – but that would leave two extra tiny nubs in your work).
• Cut the loop in half and weave in each of the resulting ends (again, it’s safe to do this, but I’m not sure how well the ends would stay hidden over time).
• Undo alllll the way back to the loop and redo it properly.

Can you guess which one I did?! That’s right, I frogged back to fix the mistake whenever I realised that I’d done it again, sometimes unravelling 5 or 6 entire rows, so I could fix the problem – ugh.

And here’s the other problem with this yarn: the fluffy chenille is very ‘grabby’ – when you’ve pulled a loop through another loop, they tend to hold in place. This is obviously a good thing when you have a whole row of loose loops to work with, but it does mean that unravelling takes almost as long as knitting the loops in the first place!

Adding a New Ball of Yarn

I couldn’t find any info on how to add the next ball of yarn, so my solution was to hold the last loop of the old ball and the first loop of the new ball together. Then, on the next row, all I had to do was to remember to pass the new loop through both the loops below.

Tip: As there are free loops all over the place, it’s easy to miss the doubled loop, so I clipped a locking stitch marker around both loops so I could easily spot them again as I worked the next row.

The Result

My finished blanket is 43×57″, which is a nice size for a sofa throw. (It did confuse me though, as the pattern claims the blanket is 56″ wide, not 43″ – I think that must be a mistake in the pattern instructions, as that’s a huge discrepancy.)

Isn’t it pretty?

Although it’s far too hot to even contemplate needing a thick cozy blanket at the moment, I know I’ll enjoy using mine when the cooler weather arrives. It’s very soft, has a good weight to it, and I love that lattice stitch pattern.

A couple more angles…

Here’s the texture of the back of the blanket.

And here are the top and bottom edges – they did end up matching nicely.

And, most importantly: it’s passed the Maggie test! She curled straight up on it on my lap and went to sleep – that’s high praise from my discerning girl. 😉

Relaxing Verdict

Loop knitting is definitely a relaxing craft if you’re following a simple repetitive pattern. Once you’ve completed the first row, it’s very easy to form knit stitches by pulling the next loop from the working yarn through the next loop of the row below. I found it to be mostly relaxing once I got used to my more challenging stitch pattern, and if you chose a more straightforward stitch pattern, it would be very relaxing!

Finger knitting with pre-looped yarn means you don’t need to worry about tension – the size of each loop is fixed, so you know you’ll get a nice even result without any effort to control it. But it does give rise to the problem of accidentally leaving a loop on the back of your work – that’s one thing that would never happen with knitting or crochet, or even finger knitting, where you always control the flow of yarn.

Immersing your fingers directly in the soft cozy yarn to create a blanket makes a nice change from holding a hook or needles, but my overall verdict is that looped yarn is a bit of a novelty with limited applications. It’s fun to try, and the results can be lovely – I’m very happy with my chunky blanket! – but I don’t see loop knitting becoming the ‘next big thing’ in fibre arts. What do you think?

My husband is a maker like me, but he prefers wood, metal and plastic to yarn and fibre, so our hobbies rarely intersect. But he has his own 3D printers, which means he can make custom plastic stuff for me if I ask. While I love that idea in theory, I’ve struggled in the past to think of anything that would be useful – there’s no point adding more plastic rubbish into the world just because it’s possible to make it.

Lately, though, I’ve been full of ideas for useful items, and Dave has brought them to life for me – I thought you might like to see what we’ve come up with…

USB Cable Holder

I use a long USB cable to plug my camera into my computer so I can transfer my photos without having to remove the memory card every time I want to check if I’ve captured the shot I needed.

I’ve been using a sticky-backed cable clip, but I’ve gone though two of them now – after a while, the adhesive fails and they fall off the edge of my desk. I thought that something that clipped onto the edge of the desk would be sturdier and less likely to fall off.

I found this design on Thingiverse – a database of free printable designs – and Dave customized it to fit the height of my desk perfectly. It has a clever swivel barrel so I can remove the cable if necessary, but it’s firmly locked in place the rest of the time. It’s perfect!

In case you’re wondering, the matching flower stickers mean I always know which way to insert the USB plug into the socket 😉

Sprouting Jar Tray

You may remember that I grow my own sprouts on my kitchen windowsill. The jars leave watermarks on the windowsill, and, while the marks have wiped off easily so far, I don’t want to risk damaging the wood.

I requested a very shallow tray, just long enough to fit the sprouting jar and no wider than the windowsill. We measured up, Dave designed and printed it, and look what I have now!

It’s just what I needed, and nicely unobtrusive in white to match the windowsill.

Tea Dividers

This is my best idea yet! I designed my kitchen to include a narrow spice cupboard, with the intention of using it for teas instead of spices. It’s great in theory, but boxes of individually-wrapped tea bags took up too much space horizontally and were too tall to fit vertically.

I figured out that by taking the tea bags out of the boxes, we could effectively double the space! We came up with this design between us using a few cardboard prototypes until we figured out that this I-beam shape would work well as a divider that always stays upright.

With these dividers, I can fit 4 different types of tea where 2 boxes used to sit, I can move the dividers to fit the current stock of tea bags, and, as a bonus, the tea bags are more accessible too.

I’m finally seeing the benefit of having a 3D printer (and an experienced operator) in the house! Isn’t technology great? It’s amazing, coming up with an idea and having the physical product in my hands just a few hours later.

I’m sure there must be more handy items that we could design and print to make our lives easier. I wonder what we’ll think up next…

After my review of diamond painting, I decided to jump in and buy some kits! I ordered my favourite Diamond Dotz kit – the Graceful Swimmer sea turtle – and I also picked up a cheap but pretty kit from amazon of a purple-tinted landscape so I could compare the quality of the two.

Quality

I’d expect the quality of an expensive kit to be higher than a cheap kit, but what are the actual differences, and do they affect the appearance of the end product and/or how enjoyable the kit is to make? Let’s take a look…

Price: I paid $49 (Canadian dollars) + tax for my Diamond Dotz kit, and only $8 + tax for my amazon cheapy! Although the branded kit is much larger than my cheap one, the smaller Diamond Dotz kits don’t cost much less ($40ish) so there’s still a massive difference in price between them and the unbranded kits.

Packaging: The Diamond Dotz canvas was rolled neatly in a protective box, so it had no creases. The cheap canvas was folded flat around the diamond packets, so the canvas was very creased and it wouldn’t lie flat when I first opened it (although it did flatten out when the diamonds were added).

Canvas: The canvas backing is definitely nicer on the expensive kit, but I’m not sure that matters at all – you won’t see the fabric once the piece is finished and it’s been framed or mounted.

The cheap kit (left) has a rougher canvas backing that’s not finished as nicely as the more expensive kit (right).

Tools: Although the tools provided with both kits are similar, the Diamond Dotz tool has a comfort foam grip, the tray has a spout to pour unused diamonds neatly back into their bag without spillage, and the pink wax comes in a little plastic jar.

I prefer the Diamond Dotz toolkit (left) because of the foam grip on the tool and the spout on the tray.

Diamonds: My Diamond Dotz kit has square diamonds, and the unbranded kit has round ones (more on that later…). Both kits included far more diamonds than needed to complete the picture. This is intentional, as some of the plastic diamonds will always be flawed, so you can just discard any that would detract from your finished picture without worrying that you’ll run out.

Misshapes, holes, extra material, blobs – you can expect to find a few of these in every kit

Interestingly, I actually found far more flawed diamonds in the expensive kit than in the cheap kit! In both cases, though, there were so many spares that I had dozens of every colour left at the end, despite being very picky and discarding any with the slightest imperfection, so the flaws weren’t a problem in either case.

Adhesion: With my cheap kit, a small section of the adhesive surface stuck to the plastic cover sheet along one of the creases where the canvas had been folded to ship. When I pulled back the cover sheet, the adhesive came away with it, so there was no glue to stick the diamonds to in that area. Apart from that one area, the adhesive surface worked well.

Oh no! The diamonds just won’t stick in this patch where the letters are visible!

Even though my expensive kit was many times larger, I had no problems at all with adhesion – every diamond stuck down perfectly.

Diamond Shape

While the diamond shape happens to be a difference between my kits, it’s just something to be aware of. Neither round nor square diamonds is necessarily a better or higher quality choice.

• Square diamonds fill the entire picture without any spaces, so they give an extra-shiny and neat finish. It’s satisfying to line them all up perfectly and the result is stunning, but it is a bit slow and fiddly to place each one exactly straight.
  
• Round diamonds are very fast to place, as you don’t need to orient them. A little of the backing canvas shows through between the circles, but it’s so much faster and easier to do, it makes for a joyful project!
  

I’d definitely recommend choosing a kit with round diamonds if:

• you’re buying a kit for a child to use
• you have less dexterity in your hands or any vision problems
• you want a very relaxing project

But if you like a little more of a challenge, the square diamonds give a brilliant result.

I did have one small issue with the round diamonds on my cheap kit: some of the letter symbols were so large that there was no way to cover the entire symbol with the diamond. You can only see it if you look closely:

Can you see the tiny dots of black below the diamonds in the middle of this photo?

It’s very minor, but it frustrates me, as this would have been easy to avoid (don’t use the largest letters M and W as symbols, or use a slightly smaller font when printing the design). Although this wouldn’t happen with square diamonds as there are no spaces between the diamonds for the backing to show through, this is a flaw in this specific kit design, not a problem with using round diamonds in general, so don’t let this put you off round diamonds!

Misleading Imagery

Here’s where things could go wrong if you buy a cheap kit – I recommend you check that the images you see online include a shot of the finished diamond painting or the chart you’ll receive, not just the original artwork the design is based on.

Branded kits like my Diamond Dotz turtle show a picture of the finished product on the box, so you know exactly what you can expect from the kit you’ll be making.

My finished project is lovely! And it looks exactly as I expected it would from the box art.

The cheap Chinese kits you can find on Amazon (for example) often only show the original artwork the kit was based on in their listing photos, and the image you’ll be forming will look very blocky and pixelated in comparison. There’s nothing wrong with buying one of these kits, provided you realise what you’re getting. For example, here’s an amazon listing photo (left) and what they left out of the listing: a photo of the completed kit (right):

I won’t leave you a link to this kit, as I’m not trying to call out this one in particular; this is just one of many misleading examples. You can see how, if you’re buying a kit based on the photo on the left, you may be surprised or disappointed if your artwork ends up looking like the image on the right – they are definitely not the same…

The listings also usually show a digital mockups of ‘the finished kit on a wall’ – not only is the image completely different from the kit you’re buying, but the size is misleading too! For example, here’s a ‘photo’ of my cheap kit:

Let’s compare that with my completed kit:

It’s less than 10″ (25cm) square, but the listing image above makes it look twice that size, far more detailed than it is, and pure purple instead of mostly pink!

In general, more abstract and less detailed source images work better for any pixel art, like cross stitch, perler beads, etc. The detail is limited to the size of your pixels (diamonds in this case) – you can’t create a fine line when your ‘paintbrush’ is the width of a diamond! A larger canvas allows for more pixels and therefore more detail.

I’d never consider buying a kit without seeing at least a digitally-rendered example of how the finished product is actually supposed to look. So I recommend, if you’re buying a cheap kit from amazon or similar, you check the reviews for those that include images and see if someone has posted a photo of their finished project. That way, you’ll know in advance whether you’ll like the result, and you won’t be disappointed.

Verdict

I’m happy with both my kits, for different reasons. The square diamonds with the large canvas took a long time and made a beautiful picture, and the round diamonds with the small canvas made for a satisfyingly quick, relaxing project.

With the branded kit, I knew exactly what I was getting and what the finished product would look like, and I imagine the image was carefully selected and customized by hand to be ideal for a diamond painting.

With the cheap kit, I suspect an automated process generated the chart from a pretty picture with little manual input, but if you choose your kit carefully, you can still end up with a lovely result at a fraction of the cost of a branded kit. (I actually prefer the pinky shades in my kit to the purple digital mockup, so I’m not at all disappointed.)

I do have one other recommendation if you’re using budget-friendly kits: I really loved the foam grip and the tray with a spout in my Diamond Dotz kit, so I’d recommend you upgrade your tools! For example, you can buy a Diamond Dotz Accessory Kit (amazon link) including 2 tools, 2 foam grips, 2 trays with spouts and 2 spare wax blocks for only a few dollars. I always recommend investing in good tools, and here’s no exception. You can reuse the same tool and tray while you make as many cheap kits as you want!

It definitely wasn’t cheap, but I think my beautiful sea turtle kit was worth the cost – the square gems are so even and sparkly, and I love the picture!

Next up in my diamond painting adventure…

• Figuring out how to frame my sea turtle art so I can enjoy it! I’ve bought some wood and I’m going to attempt to mount it like a stretched canvas (although I’m not sure exactly how yet). More on that in my next diamond painting update!
• I also need to fix that annoying bare spot in my pink landscape diamond painting. I’ve done some research and it sounds like the solution to this is to buy ‘repositionable tacky glue’ to re-tack the surface – I’ll report back on how that worked out next time, too…

For my new Relaxing Crafts series, I decided to pick up a pile of random craft kits that one of my neighbours was selling on Facebook and see if there was anything interesting for me to try…

It was quite a haul for a few dollars! There are quite a few things I’d like to experiment with in here, and I’ll pass the rest onto someone else who has kids who can use them – nothing will go to waste.

Hiding out in the bottom right corner of the above pic, I found a kit I was intrigued to start first: a small diamond painting kit.

Diamond Painting

The craft of ‘diamond painting’ – sticking flat-backed plastic ‘gems’ onto an adhesive colour-coded surface to form a pattern – seems to have sprung up from nowhere over the past few years. Have you heard of it before?

A diamond painting kit comes with an adhesive backing (this one is cardboard, but most are canvas), preprinted with the design. You fill in each space with a plastic ‘diamond’. Depending on the kit, the diamonds can be square or round – in this kit, mine were round.

There’s an individual bag for each colour of diamond. With only a few colours in this design, I found it most fun to pour a few colours into the tray at once, and then I got to play a minigame every time: to look for a piece that was a) the right colour and b) the right way up.

Each diamond has a domed front and a flat back. You pick up a diamond by loading the nib of the special pen with a little pink wax, then pressing it gently to the domed side of the diamond, so the diamond sticks to the wax:

Then you press the flat side of the diamond down to the picture. The adhesive grabs the diamond and keeps it in place. (The wax stays inside the nib of the pen, ready to grab the next diamond.)

It’s very satisfying to place all the tiny diamonds into neat rows and watch the picture emerge. It’s faster than cross stitch, much easier than paint-by-numbers(!), and once each piece is placed it stays there, so you don’t have to worry about knocking them out of place before you complete the design.

As you work, you peel back the protective plastic film from the painting a bit at a time, so the rest of the picture stays sticky and doesn’t attract dust or lint before you’re ready to apply the diamonds to it.

And, after a little time, the canvas is filled and the finished picture emerges!

Relaxing Craft Verdict

This kit was just a dollar store special and I don’t love the design, but as a test of the craft it served its purpose admirably: I call diamond painting a win on the relaxing front! Big thumbs up from me.

I’m looking at diamond painting kits now – there are lots with really nice looking designs, and I think I’ll be picking one up. Here are my top choices at the moment:

Clockwise from top left: Miniature Magic, Forest Babe, and Graceful Swimmer kits from Diamond Dotz.

I’m leaning towards the turtle – I think the diamonds may make it look like it’s swimming in a sparkling sea. What do you think?

Have you ever tried diamond painting? Are you tempted to try now? Let me know in the comments below!

Some craft projects require concentration (like following an amigurumi pattern), while other projects are relaxing in their repetitive nature (like crocheting row after row of a simple afghan pattern). I find these more relaxing crafts and projects wonderful for the times when my brain is too tired to concentrate on something complicated, but my hands still want to stay busy.

I’ve started picking up craft kits so I can try different crafts and see what appeals to me. I thought it might be fun to do a series of posts on the crafts I’m dabbling in – maybe you’ll find something you’d like to try too! (And many of these simple crafts are kid-friendly, so these could also be family craft projects, or ideas for gifts for the crafty children in your life.)

So here’s the first post in my new Relaxing Crafts series…

Paint by Numbers

I haven’t painted anything for years, and I thought that a paint by numbers kit might be a good way to practice brush technique and ease me back into the feel of painting so I could try painting something from scratch in future.

I tried the Royal & Langnickel Dolphins Painting By Numbers kit. It looked like a cute picture, and at about the size of a sheet of printer paper, I thought it’d be a manageable size.

The design and the colour-coded numbers are pre-printed onto the canvas in pale blue, so all you need to do is grab a colour of paint and fill in all the indicated areas with that colour, then repeat for all the other colours, and you have a beautiful painting! Or do you…?

I found it more difficult than I’d expected, considering these kits are designed for kids 8 and older – surely, I should have more skill than an inexperienced 8-year old? For me, it was frustrating to have to follow the arbitrary lines separating the shading colours – for example, I think I’d have preferred to try shading the dolphins in my picture myself vs trying to follow all the jagged bands of shadow and light on the dolphins’ bodies.

There are lots of fiddly jagged lines to follow to form this shading.

I also assumed I’d be provided with all the paint colours I needed, but there were lots of mixed colours required:

All the areas with two numbers are colours you have to mix yourself, e.g. “10/20” means a mix of colour 10 and colour 20. It seemed like most of the colours were mixes!

The results of some of that fiddly colour mixing are disappointingly muddy…

Some of the provided paint colours were used a lot – in mixes as well as solo – and I was always scared I’d run out, especially if I mixed too much of a certain shade and had to waste some of it. This was not a very relaxing process! But I did complete the painting…

Finished!

The end result is okay, but I feel a bit misled by the box art, which shows a coloured picture of the design, not a completed painting (and now I know to look for that, it seems that’s a common trend in these kits). The provided paint colours aren’t the same as shown in the cover picture, and the result is much less subtle, so it’s a bit disappointing.

Where are my blue dolphins from the cover pic?!

Given all that, paint by numbers is not something I’d want to try again. If I do ever brave painting again, I’ll just sketch an outline and then attempt to paint it properly – I think I could do at least as well as following the kit!

The painting is still kind of cute though – especially once I added a glint to each dolphin’s eye (that’s not part of the design).

I did pick up a few painting tips from this experience:

• Low quality paint has terrible coverage – once I’d painted over each section, I could still see the numbers printed beneath the paler paint shades and had to give them a second coat (and the white paint took three coats to cover the numbers!)
• Acrylic paint dries much darker than the colour appears when the paint is wet.
• Painting accurate fine lines is difficult, especially at certain angles. I’m much more comfortable with a pencil than a brush.

Look carefully and you can still see the blue lines around the edges of the paler colours, despite my best efforts to hide them 🙁

Relaxing Craft Verdict

As a relaxing craft, I’m calling Paint by Numbers a fail – for me, anyway.

• If you’re inexperienced in painting, taking care not to stick your hand in the wet paint or paint over the lines requires a fair amount of concentration.
• If you’re already a painter, you really don’t need a paint by numbers kit – you’d do better without one!

Maybe I was just unlucky with my choice of kits and there are better ones out there. Have you (or your kids) had any success with paint by numbers kits, or do you agree with my assessment? Let me know in the comments!

And now, my search for relaxing crafts continues. I have quite a few lined up already, but I’d love to hear your suggestions for crafts I can try – and review here for you – too. Please leave your ideas below… 🙂

I’ve been experimenting with making my own skincare products using natural ingredients, and I thought you might be interested to hear about it…

I’ll tell you all about these later in this post!

Hand cream and nail oil are secret weapons in my business – it’s only because of them that my hands (hopefully!) never look objectionable, even in close-up tutorial photos.

Not a hangnail in sight!

How I Got Started

My journey to make my own lotions and potions began with a quest to protect my face from the harsh cold of the Canadian winter. After developing eczema while living in South Africa (where it never gets very cold), I discovered I had a whole new set of skin problems to contend with when I came home. I needed to find a way to protect my now-sensitive face, which had become extremely intolerant of the cold.

I bought and tried lots of creams that I’d been recommended, with results ranging from ineffective, to eczema-triggering, to disastrous (e.g. covering my face in Aquaphor without realising that it contained lanolin until my eyes swelled up and the allergic reaction began…)

So I decided to take the plainest moisturising cream that didn’t give me any symptoms, and supercharge it by adding extra skin-friendly oils to rebuild and protect my skin’s moisture barrier. And it worked! My skin is much happier these days 🙂

But this wasn’t just useful… it was fun! I realised I could probably mix my creams and oils in different ways, with a few extras, to make different skincare products for myself.

Choosing Oils

There are lots of 100% pure oils derived from plants that have beneficial properties for the skin: grapeseed, sweet almond, jojoba, rosehip, argan, marula, and many more. To figure out which I should try, I looked at the ingredients of products I already liked, then did some googling and borrowed books from the library to find out which oils sounded like they’d be most helpful for my needs.

And then there are essential oils: highly concentrated plant extracts that must be diluted before use. They are used for aromatherapy and may have other health benefits. There’s a passionate community of essential oil advocates and I briefly got sucked into that – the potential benefits of certain oils made them sound very appealing. After I bought a few bottles and tried them, I realised that I don’t do well with most scents – giving myself a headache was not what I intended! Now I only use the essential oils that have a scent that makes me feel happy and calm (more on that below).

Once I’d sorted out what to try, I bought some of my supplies from a local health food shop, and some online.

Supplies: ingredients and empty containers

I did some more research to figure out roughly how much of each oil I should be using (here’s a very rough starting point: up to 10% of regular oils and 1% of essential oils), and then started experimenting with adjusting the proportions until I got a result I liked.

Combining the Ingredients

If my end product will be an oil, I use droppers to add the different component oils into the container and then close the container and shake it to mix them together.

It’s a little more difficult when making a cream or lotion. First I measure or weigh out all my ingredients into a bowl and mix them together with a little spoon:

In these photos I’m making my pink grapefruit hand cream, and yes, it looks pretty unappealing at first! But after a good mixing it looks smooth and creamy:

I’ve discovered that you have to mix and mix to get the oils to emulsify properly with a cream or lotion – even if it looks well-mixed, the oils can begin to separate out after a few days or weeks. Now, I stir for an extra minute or two after it looks like its fully mixed.

Then it’s just a matter of decanting into a container and it’s ready to use and enjoy!

(All my containers are reusable: I wash them out when they’re empty and refill them, so I can be a bit more environmentally friendly.)

My ‘Products’

(I’m calling them products, but these aren’t intended for sale – they’re just for my own use.) These are my favourite skincare products that I’ve made so far:

L-R: headache oil, hand cream, nail oil

I made a spearmint headache oil in a glass rollerball bottle, with a sweet almond oil base. I massage it onto the sides of my forehead when I get a tension headache and it helps. Spearmint essential oil has a sweeter and more uplifting scent than peppermint, it’s gentler on the skin, and I find it very relaxing. And doesn’t the yellow oil look pretty in my blue/clear glass bottle?!

I came up with a really rich moisturizing hand cream enriched with jojoba, rosehip and pink grapefruit oils, which completely stops my hands from getting dry or rough (even with all the hand washing we have to do these days!) I find the sweet citrus scent of the pink grapefruit to be a great mood-lifter and very relaxing.

I replaced my favourite (and pricey) nail oil with my homemade version – sweet almond and jojoba oils and vitamin E in a container with a built-in brush applicator keep my cuticles looking good for all those close-up tutorial photos. It doesn’t have the almond fragrance of my favourite brand, but that’s just an artificial fragrance anyway, so I’m happy to live without the scent. I get the same results as the brand name for a fraction of the price, so I can use my nail oil as often as I want without feeling guilty!

Verdict

As any crafter knows, it’s always a special feeling to be able to use things you’ve made yourself.

I know this may seem like a small thing, but using my own customized creams and oils with my favourite uplifting natural scents gives me a little happiness boost every time I wash my hands or prepare my cuticles for taking photos, or comforts and relaxes me when I have a headache or eczema symptoms.

Try It Yourself

If you want to try dabbling, it can be as simple as adding a couple of drops of your favourite essential oil to a jar of lotion and then stirring it well until it’s all mixed in. For example, I add a few drops of spearmint essential oil to my tub of foot cream and it adds an extra zing to the unfragranced moisturizer.

Or, if you want to try just one moisturising oil, I’d recommend jojoba oil. Its molecules are close in size to the natural oils produced by the body, so it absorbs very easily, making it a highly effective moisturiser. You can mix it with other ingredients like I do, or use it by itself as a moisturiser (it’s safe to use anywhere on your face and body) or cuticle oil. It’s light and gentle – despite the name, it’s actually a liquid wax, not an oil – and, as it absorbs so well, it won’t leave you feeling greasy or looking shiny. It’s stable, and a little goes a long way, so one bottle will last for ages – my first bottle is still going strong after 18 months!

Do you make your own skincare products? What are your favourite ingredients? Or are you tempted to try something for the first time now? Tell me about it!