Golden Hour Floral Diamond Painting Kit

January rooms need help. Not more lamps: something on the wall that behaves like light even when none of it is coming through the window.

Gerbera daisies open wide across the canvas in orange, gold and buttery yellow, and monarch and sulphur butterflies move through them with their wings tilted so the light catches the upper edge. A streaked wood-grain backdrop runs behind it all in warm browns, which stops the brights from floating. The whole palette sits on the warm side of the wheel with almost nothing cool in it, so the finished piece throws heat into a room the way a lit window does.

Twenty-one DMC colors, 300 through 3864, is a tight range spent entirely on warm tones. Nothing is wasted on a cool background, so the yellows get five or six steps of their own and a petal can travel from cream at the tip to deep amber at the base without a visible seam.

The details

• 45 x 45 cm (18 x 18 in)
• Full coverage, round drills
• 21 DMC colors, DMC 300 to DMC 3864
• Adhesive canvas with printed symbols and color legend
• Sealed, numbered, DMC color-coded drill packets
• Stylus pen, grooved tray, wax refill and tweezers included

Straight talk

Roughly 25 to 30 hours, likely three or four weeks of evenings. Warm palettes are harder to sort by eye than cool ones, since several of the golds look near-identical under a lamp, so work from the printed DMC number rather than the look of the drill. Round drills, full coverage, kit and blank rolled canvas rather than a finished piece. No frame included.

Hang it opposite the window it is standing in for. Come February you will see why.