Purple Butterfly Diamond Painting Kit

Sixteen colors, and nearly all of them are purple. What that buys you is an evening with no hunting: you are not crossing the tray for a color that changes everything, you are deepening one, lilac to violet to something close to black.

Deep violet gerbera daisies open beside soft lilac petals, and monarch and glasswing butterflies drift between them against a streaked wood-grain backdrop. The wood keeps its warm gray, so the purples read as purple rather than as shadow. The daisies are cropped large, which means a single flower head is an hour of its own and the petal edges have room to shade properly. The glasswings are the odd note in it, mostly pale and half transparent where every other wing is saturated.

A tight palette is the argument for this one. Sixteen colors, DMC 208 through DMC 3865, means fewer packets to sort, fewer trips to the legend and fewer decisions per hour, which is exactly what a lot of people want from a kit after a long week. It also means the finished piece hangs as one block of color rather than competing with whatever else is already on the wall.

The details

• 45 x 45 cm (18 x 18 in)
• Full coverage, round drills
• 16 DMC colors, DMC 208 to DMC 3865
• 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, so budget three or four weeks of evenings. The catch with a one-color painting is that four of those purples look identical in lamplight, so work near a window or under a daylight bulb and go by the printed symbol, not by eye. This is a kit, not a finished picture. The canvas ships rolled, so flatten it under something heavy overnight first. No frame included.

Purple holds up at night better than almost anything else, which is when you will mostly be looking at it.