Last year while I was still working in an office I started diamond painting during my lunch. At the time we had hour long lunches and I wanted something easy to work on while I chatted with my coworkers. A lot of my coworkers were also crafty and it wasn’t unusual for everyone else to be knitting or crocheting during breaks and lunches so I brought in a small Diamond Art Club painting Plumeria to work on while we socialized. This was one I had bought to work on with my mom but she wasn’t interested so I brought it into work since it is only 13″ x 17″ and a quick project that wasn’t so complicated that I would get lost if I could only work in 15 minute bursts. It is fabulous to work on by the way!

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I made some decent progress before a couple of my coworkers got super interested and we decided to do a diamond painting together. They did not want to spend Diamond Art Club prices but I did not want to by an unlicensed painting off of Amazon so we settled on the cheaper version of Stained Glass Flower Diamond Art Club sells on Amazon for beginners. They had a bunch of great paintings but we all loved the colorful flowers in Stained Glass Flower by Peggy Collins so that is what we ordered.

This is still a smaller painting with round diamonds at 13″ x 13″ with 13,689 drills but at 53 colors including 3 ABs it has plenty of sparkle to go around! I also bought a small case off of Amazon to store my drills and tools so I could leave everything at my desk on a shelf and didn’t have to schlep it back and forth. This was super helpful and gave me time to focus on just one painting at a time.

Unfortunately with my most recent move I had to leave my job and my beloved coworkers. We still keep in touch though and they are both working away at their copies of Stained Glass Flower. I finished mine recently after a big push to get it done and it turned out amazing! I was taking it to sports practice on the regular and all of the other moms and kids were asking about it and loved the sparkles. I don’t know how long this ended up taking me but I had just done the bottom right corner and some of the outlining before my big push and I spent about 15 relaxed hours on it after that.

I absolutely love the rendering of this one and the whole things sparkles amazingly. The AB drills were the white, pink and some of the green and they made the piece sparkle even more. The blending of the colors was well done and it made the flowers really stand out.The yellow outlines brought all of the flower colors together and this piece really cemented Peggy Collins as one of my favorite artists to do diamond paintings for. I have since bought a couple of other diamond paintings from her collection on Diamond Art Club and I can’t wait to get started on them. 

One of my favorite sections was the top right corner with a blend of all the shades of flowers in a small space. I loved the purples and the dark blues which were a change after working on the large red and pink toned flowers. It is crazy how in the red and pink flowers you would have several colors that looked similar but when you placed them next to each other on the canvas you could immediately tell they were different but blended well together for shading and depth.

I was curious to see if the quality was much different for the Amazon DAC pieces versus the more expensive ones you buy on their site. Although the tray that came with it was smaller and not as nice, I did not see any other differences in quality on this one. The drills did not have a lot of trash and sparkled just as nicely as a regular DAC piece.

One difference that was noticeable was far fewer extra diamonds included in the kit. I did not run out at all but there were a few colors where there were only a few left and I could see that if you had a small spillage you would have not had enough but overall it was great. I actually enjoyed not having a ton of extra drills to find a home for. In contrast, when I finished Joyous Ladies I had a whole large pack of 310 leftover and some of my bottles are still half full of drills. Joyous Ladies is a much larger piece though and the kit came with 5 or 6 full bags of 310 total I believe as it had a black outline everywhere in the artwork. I tried to get a picture to show how few drills were left overall but I know it is kind of hard to see.

Overall I was very happy with this diamond painting and I would highly recommend it to anyone who loves flowers and bright colors. I am thinking of doing the full version at a later time but this one was enough to scratch my itch so I may not. Check out the links below to find both the Amazon version and the full version of this piece. Let me know in the comments if you have completed this one and how you liked it!

Final Verdict:

Links:

Stained Glass Flowers Review on our YouTube Channel Cozy Oscoey

Stained Glass Flower Small Diamond Painting (Amazon)

Stained Glass Flower Garden Large Diamond Painting (DAC)

Plumeria by Renjitha Anoop at Diamond Art Club

Diamond Art Club Referral Code: Get $10 off your first purchase 

Small Diamond Painting Storage Kit With Tools

Number 5 in my Rereading Books Before I Give The Away Part 1 series is Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. This book has been around for a while and I forgot how much I liked it the first time I read it. There is also a movie adaptation to this book that is pretty good too. Check out the rest of the books in our series Rereading Books Before I Give The Away Part 1  where I do a small drawing and a brief review of each book. I only have three left to read and two more to review after Memoirs of a Geisha so look for another set of books for me to read soon in Part 2!

This site participates in affiliate links and receives a small fee for affiliate recommendations at no cost to you. As always we only recommend products we have tried ourselves. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

I will be completely honest with you, I put off writing this review for many, many months because I could not think of what I would draw for this one. For some reason this kept me from finishing the review and starting on the next few so I now have eight or so book reviews to write before the end of the year. My goal is to post one a week until the end of December but I will definitely need to read way more books to complete that goal!

I really like Memoirs of a Geisha. I read it many years ago and again earlier this year and it is very well written. The book is about a young girl named Chiyo pulled from rural Japan who is sold to a Geisha House. The book is her telling her story in her own words and how this affected her life both post and pre-World War II. Life as a young girl was hard for Chiyo but she persevered and a lot of insightful writing helps the reader through the story. Chiyo is a beautiful girl and this causes rivalry and conflict amongst her peers. Does she come out on top? Read it to find out!

I really enjoyed reading this book again but I am on the fence about keeping it. My middle daughter will probably be ready to read it in a few years and I feel like this book is a great one for high schoolers to read. It is also easily available from the library so my verdict is…keep for now and reassess once I unpack all of my other books. We are in the middle of moving and I want to see what else I have before I decide on this one since it is such a good book!

VERDICT: Keep for now…

Our next book will be “the namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri

Resources:

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

We’ll Meet Again by Mary Higgins Clark

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka

Rereading Books Before I Give The Away Part 1

For 2022 we are focusing on our grocery spending and trying to find ways to reduce it despite all of the price increases. In January we completed a pantry cleanout challenge and in February I focused on eating through the odds and ends in our freezer. Unfortunately we had some family issues come up in February that we are still dealing with at the end of March and I was not able to post our February spending. I may go back and post it later when I have time but at this point it might be too late. I did not worry about our grocery spending for the second half of February and the first part of March since I was swamped with taking care of my family member so our low spend goal went a little bit sideways.

January 2022 Spending

Looking back at my January spending post we aimed to keep our groceries at about $800 a month which was reducing our spending down from about $1000 a month. We do not include items such as cleaning supplies, paper products, dog food and coffee in our total since I track these separately. We do not eat out ever and we have quite a few dietary restrictions which can be expensive. I started tracking our coffee separately at the beginning of the year since I was drinking so much of it and wanted a good baseline for it. I only track the beans we buy and when we go out for coffee, not the cream or milk that we put in it since we use those for other things as well. Recently I have reduced my consumption so it will be interesting to see at the end of the year how that plays out.

One expense besides groceries that has been increased lately is for our larger dogs. Luna (bottom) had some skin issues and required a couple of visits to the vet. We also needed to hire a trainer and buy tons of toys to keep their brains stimulated in different ways. For some reason I totally forgot some of the tricks we used for George (top) to keep him occupied during the teenage puppy months so it was super helpful to get some ideas for Luna. They plus our dachshund are now eating through about 40 pounds of dog food every 2.5 to 3 weeks which is insane to me. We switched them to one of the Kirkland brand foods and they seem to be doing ok on it which is great since it cut our dog food bill significantly. Even though we are experienced dog owners we have never owned a herding dog before and Luna has proved to be a challenge in ways our other dogs were not so we felt hiring a trainer to get through the next few months before she turns a year would be helpful and after one visit we are already seeing improvement.

For March my goal was to be at $625 for the whole month since we had inherited some food from a family member and we had stocked up in both January and February. What we actually ended up spending was….

Whoa. We really blew past our budget and then some. I looked back at what we bought and we ended up stocking up on some items that were on super sale that we eat a lot at Costco (gluten free supreme pizza I am talking to you), shelf-stable items our picky eater loves and that frequently go out of stock such as fruit leather, and pantry basics that I realized we were low on like oil, beans, spaghetti sauce and bread. Yup. We ate up most of the bread I bought in January and we had to do another bread run at the Franz Outlet. I also went through our emergency supplies and realized we had no canned vegetables or fruit so I bought enough for about a week. We are heading into spring and our garden will be in full swing in about a month or two so I am not as worried about having cans of veggies and fruit on hand. We have a ton of frozen blueberries, strawberries, peaches, broccoli, potatoes, peas and green beans in our freezer and my kids will not really eat canned food so I am hopeful that if we do have some sort of emergency without power we will be ok with just the few freeze dried cans I bought. If all else fails they can just have the dried fruit we have on hand and skip some of the veggies for a bit. I would much rather go without veggies for a week or two than have to use up a month or two’s supply of canned veggies every year but that’s just me.

At the moment our freezers are full and our pantry shelves have only a few spots where I suspect we will need to stock up either this month or the next so I am feeling pretty good. My goal for April is to keep our grocery spending under $600. It is a pretty tight goal but I would love to eat through some of our freezer again this month to make sure we are rotating through everything in a timely manner. I have some freezer meals we need to eat up, some meals I prepped for lunches and I would love to do an inventory mid-month when we have eaten through some of what we have to plan our spending for May.

I would also love to do a deep clean of our garage fridge which takes emptying most of it out to scrub everything down. I honestly have not really taken an inventory of what is in there since my husband uses parts of it to store things he has made which are never labeled. Maybe this month we can go through it together and clear out what needs to be tossed. We do have a crate of 90 eggs which my mother-in-law dropped off last week that need to be eaten before I can clean it though. I am not really sure what to do with all of those eggs, especially since we had just bought 5 dozen from Costco. I gave a dozen to our oldest daughter and I am toying with the idea of pickling two gigantic mason jars worth of eggs with some of the rest. We do eat a lot of eggs in our family but this is way to much for even us so I will most likely give some away on our local Buy Nothing group.

For now we will continue to eat through what we have and keep a running list of what we need as we avoid going to the store for as long as possible. We are trying to keep our expenses down in other areas as well and are taking cheap or free day trips over spring break instead of going on vacation. Last weekend we drove up to Deception Pass on Whidbey Island and had a wonderful time exploring Cranberry Lake. We packed lunches and had a great time. This trip cost us only about $20 total and most of that was from the ferry trip home where all passengers are free.

What are your grocery spending goals for April?

The Importance of Walking in the Wood With Kids

Gardening Update 11.07.21

Meal Planning: January 2022 Week 4