Rosy Piglet Diamond Painting Kit

Not everything you hang up has to be serious. Some weeks you want to spend your evenings on a bucket of roses with a very small pig in it, and that is a complete and defensible reason to buy a craft kit.

The piglet peers over the rim of a rustic red bucket, ears up, and the bucket is packed with velvety red roses and cheerful gerbera daisies crowding in around him. It is painted the way a watercolor behaves, with the edges soft and the color pooling darker where the petals overlap. The reds are deep enough that the pale pink of the snout stands out from three rooms away, and the roses take up more of the canvas than the pig does, which is the joke the picture is making.

A good chunk of the 22 colors, DMC 224 through DMC 3865, goes on that face. Pink to cream across the ears and nose in small steps is the entire reason he reads as an animal rather than a cartoon, and it is why the kit needs more shades than a bucket of flowers otherwise would.

The details

• 45 x 45 cm (18 x 18 in)
• Full coverage, round drills
• 22 DMC colors, DMC 224 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, and fine for a confident beginner. The face is where the small color blocks live, so decide early whether you want it as your warm-up or your reward, because it is fiddlier than the roses and it is the part people rush. You are buying a kit, not a completed canvas, and no frame comes with it. The canvas arrives rolled and wants a night under something flat.

He goes up somewhere people will see him on the way past, which is the only correct place for a pig in a bucket.