In my ongoing obsession with diamond painting, I’ve been watching lots of “stash” videos, in which chagrined crafters exhibit the staggering number of diamond painting kits they purchased but never completed, or in most cases, even started. I really get it. Diamond painting seems akin to getting tattoos—once you get one, you want more and more. This is such a phenomenon in diamond painting that there are entire “de-stash” communities online for swapping and selling kits. I haven’t looked at them, of course, because I’ve been making a concentrated effort to behave myself. I have a rule that I can’t work on more than one kit at a time, and that I need to complete a kit before purchasing a new one. I’ve kind of stuck with this, but circumstances out of my control have forced me—forced, I tell you, to bend the rules when it comes to not purchasing a new kit before completing one. It’s not my fault that Joanne’s had a sale, and that I got some diamond paintings for Christmas, and that I had to put one kit away unfinished because it was full of black squares and made me cry. Even with all of that, I don’t have anything near resembling a stash. I have one work-in-progress, two small kits that were unexpected gifts, and one unopened kit that I’m not super excited about. That is nothing in comparison to the literally hundreds of kits that some of these people have. (I don’t know where they keep all of them, because they don’t seem to live in big spaces.) And now I feel like I’m protesting too much, like when I met with my boss recently to look at my storage area at work and went overboard trying to convince him I wasn’t a hoarder when he raised his eyebrow at the years worth of fancy paper I have stored in tubs. It’s expensive, ornate that paper I needed for events and I’m not just going to throw it out, okay? Sheesh.
That having been said, I have my eye on my next kit from, ironically, a small company called “Enabler’s Outpost.” I saw it reviewed and it’s absolutely stunning, full of crystalline drills in soothing greens and browns:
Cascade by the Colorful Cat Studio
It’s also a square, which I have wanted to try for a while since I’ve worked almost entirely in rounds, other than that one aforementioned disaster I had to put away.
The other sort of artistry I’ve been obsessed is design, since the much-anticipated Bloomin’ Spring update has gone live in Dinkum. We can make waterfalls and rocky landscapes now! Some builders have gone absolutely bonkers, designing huge, elaborate waterscapes and lighthouses. These are the spreadsheet-wielding, tape-measuring types, and they’re geniuses. Me, I just sort of wing it. I have plans for a large waterscape, but I’m not sure where to put it yet. So I started very tentatively playing around with the water element:
And we finally have stone lettering, so I was pretty proud of this town sign I designed:
I was feeling sort of bad about my lack of sweeping artistic vision when it comes to in-game design, but then my favorite designer dude Gerse said that the only real criteria for a good design is that you are happy with it, and that it fits into the overall visual theme you are aiming for. I have a small, tight-knit town that is full of cute little sitting areas and reading gardens, and it’s not suitable for a huge landscape feature, so I’m happy with my tiny waterfall park for now. But I am going play around with a larger design elsewhere on the map just as a challenge. I’m excited to see what I can do!
--Kristen McHenry
Hoarding rocks, and so does this brilliantly entertaining post!