Author Lois Winston, she who writes the series about
me, recently asked her newsletter subscribers for ideas for the craft to be
featured in Handmade Ho-Ho Homicide,
the next Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, which will be available in the
fall. One subscriber, Jessica Johnson, suggested diamond painting. I’d never
heard of diamond painting, so I hopped over to Google to find out about this
new craft craze.
The image above is not a photo of Van Gogh’s Starry
Night. It’s a diamond painting kit of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, which uses tiny
rhinestones, not actual diamonds. If it did, the kit would cost quite a bit
more than $13.99! But diamond painting is a much cooler name than rhinestone
painting.
Diamond painting is being described as a cross
between paint-by-number and counted cross stitch, but as I watched the video, I realized it was the grownup version of Perler bead fusing. If you or your kids
are of a certain age, you probably crafted with Perler beads at one time. Years
ago someone discovered that Perler beads could be used for more than stringing
necklaces and bracelets. You could arrange them in molds and fuse them together
with an iron to form shapes and pictures. Check out the video.
Perler beads don’t sparkle, though. So another
classic craft might also spring to mind is Lite-Brites. However, there’s
really no way to make Lite-Brite designs permanent, at least none that I know.
Back to diamond painting, it really isn’t a craft
that will work in Handmade Ho-Ho
Homicide because there would be no way to include the patterns. One of the
limits to including crafts in ebooks and trade paperbacks is that the crafts featured
don’t require patterns or charts. How would you cut a pattern out of an ebook? But
diamond painting was such an interesting spin on some old crafts from back in
the day that it deserved a blog post.
