Why It Took Me 5 Months To Finish 1 Diamond Painting

Stress relieving and calming is what I thought Diamond Painting would be like, aka beautifully peaceful like floating on a cloud (ok maybe I was delirious from tiredness). It was true in the general sense, but I didn’t realise that the five dollar tiger would take me five months to complete.

Let’s start from the beginning. A few weeks before Christmas 2020, my daughter and I had been browsing the discount stores when I spotted a display of diamond painting kits reduced from ten dollars down to five. I couldn’t believe it. My older sister had been diamond painting for about six months or more and they looked beautiful all framed on her walls, I was intrigued so I was like why not. My next challenge was choosing a design, thankfully I had my two year old helper with me to decide. I held one up after the other, finally choosing the neon coloured tiger in the image above.

Taking it home, I was excited to start and looking forward to having some ‘me time’ which is a rarity when you work full time, your husband works full time and studies, and you have a two year old. Putting it bluntly, it sat in its box for about 4 weeks on top of the pile of stuff on my desk before I even had the time to look at it and see what the instructions were. They seemed easy enough as I had completed paint by number projects before, but the issue I had wasn’t with the difficulty, it was time. Finding the time I mean where I could sit and work on it was hard. It need a flat area, I tried so many places (ie. Top of chest of drawers before bed, sitting cross-legged on the floor at the coffee table and lastly my desk). The desk proved the best as I could leave it there, providing I covered the little diamonds away from little, sticky fingers.

I definitely underestimated this tedious, fiddly task and began to just want to get it finished, it seemed the diamonds were never ending. I would continuously look over where I had completed and whoops missed a square, so had to grab one teeny, tiny diamond out of its labelled container and push it on the lonely spot. It’s not that I was OCD about this, but I wanted it to look awesome, despite dreading the time it was taking. Between waking up at 5:30am to be out of the house by 6:30am and not returning to the house until approximately 6:00pm, it is no wonder it took as long as it did. Most nights I would get home, too tired and just wanting to lay down. In hindsight, I should’ve done at least some. But exhaustion did me in.

There were times when I attempted to make a start, maybe put ten diamonds in and my daughter would ‘try and help’ but to save all the diamonds ending up on the carpet instead, I would put it away for a few days. This ran on during January, February, March until April 5th 2021 when I can excitedly say Hallelujah I finished haha. The last fiddly diamond was mounted, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Using a ten dollar white frame and some gold washi tape, the process began of mounting my finished artwork. I am so proud and definitely deserve a break.

Until I start the beautiful butterfly I brought my daughter for her room. But that can wait a month or two, let me enjoy my little bit of freedom.