Preparation: Festive Fireplace

This is it!  The day I can start all of the Christmas Collabs!  So far this is my entry to 4 different collabs.  First off, the painting is by Diamond Art Club, called Festive Fireplace by Dominic Davison.  It is a massive 38.6"x27.6" or for those of us who don't speak freedom units 98cm by 70cm.  Because of it's size I wanted to start early, but in order to participate in these collabs I had to wait until December 1st.  

First up is #winterwithDAC, the one that determined which canvas I was going to work on. It is put on by Wolfpack Diamond Painting and Rachel Rae and is sponsored by Diamond Art Club who has donated 2 $50 gift cards as grand prizes, but both ladies have hinted that there will be other prizes as well.  In order to qualify for the grand prizes you have to start a Diamond Art Club painting sometime between December 1st 2020 and December 15 2020.  It has to be either winter themed, winter holiday themed or a canvas you can craft a story around that ties it into that theme.  For example, Rachel Rae is doing Galaxy because it reminds her of those fancy high-end balls people throw around Christmas and New Years, and as a kid she always wanted to dress up in one of those fabulous gowns and go to the ball.  You will also have to fill out the google form you can find listed on either of their channels with your contact information and your screen name on your social media, so if you are chosen for a prize, no one can falsly claim to be you and snap up your prize.  There is also a facebook group you can join for the event, and posts to Instagram with the hashtag #winterwithDAC are encouraged. You can participate with a non-DAC canvas, but you will not be eligible for the grand prizes. If you have questions, feel free to look these ladies up on Youtube, they have robust channels and are very personable.

Second is #dpholidayjoy, an event put together by Mindy's Diamond Moment and I believe another Youtube creator - if anyone can supply that, feel free to comment.  This one is a very broad holiday collab, where you can participate by working on a canvas that either is holiday themed or that sparks joy in your life.  To enter, you'll get an entry for every comment you make on Mindy and her partner's wip and chat videos within a week of them being posted. You'll also be required to post progress photos on instagram under the hashtag #dpholidayjoy.  Check out her Youtube channel for more information.  

Third is #dpsweetdecember run by The Principal Painter and Mystria Diamonds.  It's very similar to the #dpholidayjoy event in that you are required to post progress photos to the hashtag on instagram and that you'll gain entries by commenting on their wip and chat videos.  The canvas you choose for this one can be something sweet, something winter or something holiday related.  Both ladies will be working on Sweet Tooth by Diamond Art Club, a canvas I myself finished in October, but you don't have to do that one in particular.  Check out their Youtube channels for more information.  

The fourth one is one I found via K Diamond Paints when she was running the massive #drillsandchills 2020.  It's #winterwips2020 and I will post an image of the rules below:

So yeah, a lot going on!  I am not in charge of any of these events, your questions are better directed to the organizers if you have any.  There's two more events I will be entering, but with a different canvas so I will post about those another day.  Happy Crafting everyone!

Mangled TSA canvas

 A new day, a new unboxing.  This one from Treasure Studios Art.  Link is below.

Unboxing Treasure Studios Art Rainbow Cheshire Cat

This poor canvas got so mangled.  I've had it hanging up now for a bit and it's not as bad as it is on camera, but I'm probably going to have to try ironing it.  One thing that did not make it into the video - sorry guys, I'm not perfect - is the price per square centimeter, which came out to 1.409 cents per square cm, which is pretty respectable next to what I paid for the Pretty Neat Creative canvas.

Now granted, I had a gift card that I won from Tia's Crazy Craft Addiction AND I used her affiliate code, Tia15 to save money on it, but still, I was not expecting PNC to be the more expensive option here.  Hopefully, their new packaging will help the canvases get to their destination in better shape.  

Unboxing: Pretty Neat Creative

I have to say, so far impressed.  A little oops with a baggie opened, but nothing huge.  The cost per square centimeter is pretty high at 2.718 cents per, but we'll see how it works out.  I have links in the video to Wolfpack's channel if you're interested in the Wolf Along.

Busy, busy, busy....

Got a lot going on.  While I'm still slowly taking down and filing away my Halloween decor. I have several WIPs going. I've parked Hogwarts - drills are pretty crappy, and have started 2 new WIPs to participate in the various Collabs.  One collab is #givethanksvember, put on jointly by Mystria Diamonds, Kiss My Krafts, The Principal Painter, and Mindy's Diamond Moment all of whom can be found on Youtube.  To participate, you pick a canvas that represents something you are thankful for.  I chose Mama Knows Best from Diamond Art Club, which is Mandy Manzano's rendition of Daenerys Targaryen, of George RR Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire.", best known for it's HBO adaptation Game of Thrones.  It's her fairly early on in the story with her three baby dragons, and it reminds me of me and my kids - husband included.  The fact that he loves dragons doesn't hurt.  So I am working on it because I am thankful for my family. Here's the progress I've made so far.

The other Collab is #whimsicalwillow, which originally was supposed to be for a specific collection of paintings from Diamond Painting Factory, but due to issues, Crafts with Crashley and DP addiction Adventures have opened it up to more broad matches to the canvases they're supposed to be working on.  You can pick canvases that had elements of the original painting which included a girl with a dress and leaves.  I floated doing Mandy Manzano's My Garden Needs Tending, another DAC, and it was approved.  So I've got that one on the go too.  

So, yeah.  I'm insane.  I'll figure it out, or I won't.

Halloween Recap

 Well, my namesake holiday has come and gone and it's time to take accounts.

I lost the first 2 weeks of October to the flu and most of the rest of the month to a head cold.  So it was a light year for decoration.  I ended up getting all of my homemade headstones out as well as the few store-bought ones as well.  I got some diamond paintings and a few other wall decorations up, and that was about it.  I just had no energy.  I got some video up on my channel of what I did get up, but it's pretty bare-bones compared to usual.  Halloween with the Hallowqueen part 1 and Halloween with the Hallowqueen part 2.  Silver lining though - it should be pretty fast to disassemble.

I was pretty worried about how many kids we were going to get for this year.  Logically I knew there would be fewer trick or treaters overall, but I figured with more houses declining participation due to the pandemic it may force the kids to go further afield for candy - and my house is lit up like a spooky beacon.  Money's been tight since, well, I havn't been working, and I ended up cobbling the treat bags together with new-bought candy, but most of the non-candy treats were leftovers from previous years, and so were the bags.  I ended up needing to use the very little bags once the bigger ones ran out, and then ran out of those leaving me with about 70 bags.  That's about what we normally get, and I had a lot of extra loose candy if it came to that.

Day of, I'm having a panic attack because I feel so completely underprepared.  I sang my way through the worst of it, and then did a flurry of last-minute decoration, getting the fog machine out and setting it up.  I asked the girls if they wanted to go trick or treating by themselves, and they jumped at it. So for the first year in a dozen, I stayed home and handed out candy.  I used a grabber arm and handed them out and got lots of compliments on the decorations.  We got, I'm guessing about 50 kids, but they were so excited to be out.  I was a little surprised that most of them were not wearing masks beyond the ones that their costumes came with, and they didn't seem to be social distancing much if at all.  

A couple of costumes stood out.  There was the most precious little toddler who was just barely two in a strawberry costume.  She clearly did not understand what the heck was going on, but her mom and I talked for a minute.  Her birthday was in October, so I introduced her to Emily, who had not left yet and showed the mom her child's future.  A little guy came up in a pizza costume, so I pretended to ask my husband if he had ordered delivery, which confused him since he couldn't see the door from where I was.  And then there was a whole group of youths in morph suits with LED masks that were fairly impressive as a group costume.  

My kids didn't get very far.  The dino costume was too cumbersome and awkward for Emily to move in much.  They did get over to Grandma's at least, but I don't think they were even gone an hour.  They had fun though.  

Brian had the chef at his golf course make us a lovely dinner to bring home, and we watched the Mandalorian while we handed out candy.  I was hoping for a bottle of wine, but apparently so were most of the city, the liquor store was so badly lined up that my husband didn't make it there.  11 years and counting of wedded bliss.

It was not Halloween as usual.  Nothing is as usual in this landscape.  But it is what it is, and those who participated seemed to have fun.  And that's really what matters in the end.  And now the really scary thing is happening south of the border - the US presidential election.  Get out and vote!  

Back to what passes for Normalcy

 So I'm back to work.  I've had two shifts so far, one cake decorating and one bakery close, and things are starting to feel right again.  I've gotten good inroads to getting the house decorated for Halloween which is racing up to meet us with all haste.  More to do yet, but so far so good.

I've gotten all my DAC orders, lost the footage of half of one unboxing, and have been fighting with updated software both to film and to edit the footage, so there has not been much activity on my channel of late while I parse out the problems.  I think I have it sorted, but we'll see.  I've tried uploading one video now three times - I'm hoping this fourth one is the charm now that I've poked the software used to encode it a few times.  Ahh, technology.  Wonderous when it works, more frustrating than anything when it does not.  

Also, note to self: check the size of your painting before you buy it.  These are some pictures of Caitlyn holding up my Festive Fireplace!  It's a blanket!

I started working on my Hogwarts painting, and already 2 squares in I'm getting frustrated with the drill quality.  So instead I've been working on the custom for my husband instead.  It's one of the last good pictures I have of my family with my mother-in-law Silvia.  It's Mother's day 2013 - she passed of Pancreatic cancer in October of that year.  Here's my progress so far:

I'm hoping to get it done and framed for my husband's birthday in mid November, but if I miss that date it'll be a Christmas present.  

Finally the Youtube Gods have smiled upon me and allowed me to upload.  Here's my post review of an Easy Whim painting from the Diamond painting club subscription box: https://youtu.be/edaH1z8fpyc

Announcing the Diamond Painting Community Calendar!

 That big thing at the top of my blog?  Yeah, that thing.  Here's what it is.

The diamond painting community has a tonne of events, but no way, at least no way that I have found, to keep track of them all.  There is a listing of lives, which I may add as recurring events, but nothing for the collabs, the fun hashtags, or any of these cool things that we do as a community.  

That's where this comes in.  I'm still testing it, but I need help.  As far as I can tell, I am the only one with permission to edit it, but I can probably expand that as needed.  I have put a few events on the calendar that I have details for and know about, and am hunting down details for a few more, but I am not everyone and cannot be everywhere, and my brain is insufficient to keep track of all things, thus the compulsion to put this into a calendar.  So I need the community's help to keep track. If you have an event or know of one that is missing from my calendar, email me: Hallowqueencrafting@gmail.com and I will put it in.  I'm hoping to make this calendar the go-to for our community.  

So what do you think?  Is this superfluous, is it genius?  Please let me know!

Negative test does not make me better

 So today I got the news that I don't have the current plague.  What's ailing me is something different, probably a case of the flu.  This is going to weaken my case when I actually get confronted by my bosses about my absenteeism, even though it shouldn't.  Staying home while sick didn't suddenly become the right idea because plague, it's always been the right idea.  Show me someone who says they never call in sick, and I'll show you someone who has come in when they shouldn't.  Not only does it make it harder for you to recover from said illness, it also makes you a germ vector.  I work with people who have pre-existing conditions.  I work with a woman who is pregnant (she just announced it publically, so I can say that now).  I work with people who are old enough to be classed as senior citizens, and while not in my own department some who are quite elderly.  And that's ignoring the customers outright.  The flu can still cause serious illness and even death.  It would be irresponsible of me to take my actively contagious rear end to work, no matter how much it hurts me financially to stay home.  

Now to step off my soapbox, yesterday I posted my video on the Wish Halloween landscape, image above is the image it was supposed to be.  It scored a dismal 3 on my unboxing scale.  Perfect score is 10.  The cost per square centimeters is 3.494 cents, which is actually pretty high.  I suppose that will have to become clear as I add in more entries here on the blog.  If you're interested in how the painting turned out, check out the video here.

Since we were going into the long weekend, I shelved the custom to keep hubby from looking too closely at it, and started another Home Craftology project - the Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party image that attracted me to Home Craftolgy in the first place.  I broke it up into 12 sections and I've already finished three of them.  The Halloween gallery wall is getting more populated - I hung another Nightmare before Christmas canvas up there and moved the Hello Fall Truck over.  I had to reframe the girl's school pictures and finally got them hung up, just in time for them to sit for new ones.  If they're even going to have school pictures this year.  I can't imagine they'll have the class pictures this year, but they could do a mosaic or compilation of the individual pictures - I actually have one from my childhood.  

Interesting times, people.  We're living in interesting times.

Day in the Pandemic life

 Yesterday was much the same as the last several days.  Get up, call the kids out of school - not going to send them to school during a pandemic when their mother is actively symptomatic.  Drag my poor aching self down to my comfortable computer chair and let the girls play, while I diamond paint and let the internet entertain me.  I then spend most of the day sitting until I can't, and then go back to bed for a while.

However, at 1:15pm I had an appointment at the COVID assessment center at our local hospital.  I don't really know that I have COVID.  I kinda suspect that's not what I have, but as of today I'm now at 7 straight symptomatic days so identifying what I have is going to be important at least to my employers.  Fortunately if I do test positive, the last several shifts I worked were largely solo.  Mom bailed on driving me, and I don't drive myself, so I ordered a cab to take me and the girls to the hospital.  The dispatcher got my address wrong - seeing as my father owned this company and my address is the same house they lived in the entire time they owned it, she's clearly new, but the driver was not sent far out of the way so we flagged him down.  The drive there was uneventful and I paid and got out of the cab with my masked children.   

The hospital had red socially distanced waiting spots outside, two people were already in line, so we took our spot.  It didn't move for a bit, so I suspected that the staff had gone to lunch, and I'm trying to entertain the girls and wondering if they can even come in with me.  Then they started taking patients in, and I asked if the girls could come in with me, which they did allow.  They offered to do tests on all of us, but I decided that, since the test rumored to be unpleasant, and I was the only one with symptoms, I would just do me.  So I relaxed, they explained the test, where they take what looks like the tiniest swab on the longest possible stick and put it up your nose.  

So I took a deep breath and relaxed trying to be a grown up and not scare my children and at first it wasn't too bad, but then I realized that he was not getting the swab where it needed to be, and then it finally drove home.  I kinda was shocked at the sensation, and let out an audible groan.  It was the unpleasant sensation of having something where nothing should be, that weird sensation you get when something goes too far down your throat, before the gag reflex kicks in.  I wouldn't call it pain, although I did have some burning afterwards and even now I can kinda feel where it was, and it's been 24 hours.  Discomfort is the better term.  Would not recommend this test unless you need it.  But it was over super quick and we left.

I ended up having to call 5 times to the cab company before anyone actually answered my call.  The line outside had gotten a lot longer, so the girls and I moved around to another section of the hospital that had benches so we could sit and wait while properly socially distanced.  I finally got through and ordered the cab, but we still waited more than half an hour for the taxi.  A patient from emergency came out and was looking around for the vanishing feature of a pay phone.  She was 60s, possibly 70s and didn't appear to have a cell phone.  Normally I would just hand her my phone, but coronavirus, so I just offered to call her ride for her, which she took me up on and thanked me for.  A moment's kindness that cost me nothing.  

After we got home via a driver that I actually knew from the old days of working for the company, I sat down and finally finished Diamond Art Club's Sweet Tooth by Myka Jelina.  I'd started it back on September 10th so it had taken me about a month to complete.  I've temporarily hung it up as is with a magnetic poster hanger I got on Amazon, but I will eventually trim it down to fit, and cover the remaining borders either with paint or decorative tape.  I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening working on laundry, my custom for my husband and heckling back to back DP lives, first Crafting Journey, then the Crafty Heifer, and of course Purple Door Crafts.  I did try to go to Tia's live - but bed was calling a little too strongly. 

Today I'm still working on the custom and still waiting for the results of the test.  I do feel less dead today, so that's something.  

Starting out with a whimper

 

Starting out with a whimper

A blog is so 2004. That may be true, but here in 2020, 2004 doesn’t seem so bad.

In 2004 I wasn’t afraid to be around people. In 2004 I didn’t have kids, let alone have to try to balance their mental health needs with the immediate risk of a pandemic. In 2004 I was in college, looking at a bright future. In 2020, I’m wondering how hard I’m going to have to fight to keep my retail job after being off for four straight days due to whatever virus I’m fighting, and wondering if it’s worth fighting for at all. In 2004 I wasn’t half hoping, half dreading tomorrow’s test not sure which result I was hoping for – confirmation that I was right to stay home because the virus I am fighting is the same one that has killed over a million people worldwide, despite the risk that then poses to those close to me and myself or a negative result that may result in ridicule for making a mountain out of a molehill and make it harder to fight for my job. As if staying home when you’re sick hasn’t always been the best decision, even before the pandemic.

So is yearning for simpler times the reason that I’ve started a blog? No. To paraphrase one of my favourite creators, Lindsey Ellis, “Sometimes you just have thoughts, and you’ve got to monetize them”. I have lots of thoughts. And one recurring thought that I’ve had is that I wanted a written repository of my adventures in life, in crafting, and in my newest obsession: diamond painting. And while I have created a presence for myself in the world of YouTube with my own channel: Hallowqueen Crafting https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUsNYHtE7kqJJRpEx_ZjLMg?view_as=subscriber, vlogging has some limitations that working in print does not. And I’ve always been better at communicating in print than face to face, or face to camera as it may be.

Also as part of my adventures in the world of diamond painting, I’ve started giving out ratings to companies based on a variety of factors. I’d like to have those ratings out there in a way that is more accessible than having to watch a number of rambling videos, and in a way that can more directly compare one company to another. I also wanted it to evolve as my understanding of the hobby evolves, as companies change and evolve, and as the hobby itself evolves.

Is this a big project? Yes, yes it is. But you tackle it like you tackle eating an elephant – one bite at a time. So let’s get down to chewing.