Christmas Teddy Bear Diamond Painting Kit

Every house has one person who plugs the string of lights in before it goes anywhere near the tree, purely to find the dead bulb early. That person is not being difficult. That person has been through this before.

Here a bear sitting under loops of holiday lights that swing across the top of the diamond painting kit canvas and come down either side of him. Warm golds carry the bulbs, deep reds fill the space behind, and glowing whites take the hot centers where the filament would be. The bulbs are the composition. Everything else in the frame exists to be lit by them.

Twenty-two DMC colors spanning 169 to 3865 gives the whites somewhere to go. A convincing bulb needs three or four values sitting within a shade of each other, and this palette carries them, so the strings glow rather than turning into a row of identical dots.

The details

• 45 x 45 cm (18 x 18 in)
• Full coverage, round drills
• 22 DMC colors, DMC 169 to DMC 3865
• Adhesive canvas printed with clear symbols and a color legend
• Sealed, numbered, DMC color-coded drill packets
• Diamond stylus pen, grooved tray, wax refill and tweezers

Straight talk

Roughly 25 to 30 hours at this size, full coverage, round drills throughout. The bulbs are the fussy part, since their highlight colors run close in tone and are easy to confuse late at night, so check the symbol rather than the shade when you are tired. Everything needed to finish is in the box apart from a frame and a decent lamp of your own. Canvas comes rolled.

No dead bulb in this string. It is lit the whole way across, every year, with nothing to test first.