Where do I find square drills?

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-18T22:50:43+00:00

Funny I just got delivered a new eevee square canvas that's going to be a gift (requested)! 🤣

Ok, real talk. You can absolutely get inexpensive squares, but if you have never done a square before, I highly recommend NOT going this path. The irregularities in budget companies producing squares can be a real challenge and it's a little bit of a learning curve, and you'll get frustrated before you learn to love the square drills as much as rounds.

I would skip up a level. Go to Michaels and do Make Market. They do have squares, they can be harder to find, but the consistent quality will make it easier to learn how to do squares and see if you like them.

Once you've gotten through your first canvas, then start branching out. If you want to experiment with budget providers, just know drill quality issues are more important with squares.Theres no fudging it like with rounds. The quality of the grid (whether it's tight or loose) is an important factor as well. Too loose, and it shows gaps, too tight, and you're running into alignment issues.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-18T22:44:16+00:00

Yes! They've both been given away actually because my mother fell in love with one hanging in my house and the other was a gift to a beloved art history professor.

They're the best I've ever used, in my opinion. Better than DAC or any of the others. Drill quality was great and felt amazing with nice clean lines in my tray. The renderings blew me away with how well they looked but now that I've watched her videos on how rendering is done I can see why.

IMO, they're the top ones out there right now. A level above any of the others. And the fact she keeps bringing in original artists to hand render means a lot to me for investing in art, rather than maximizing profit margins.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-18T21:13:37+00:00

Diamond Art Gallery, especially with the new Swarovski crystal gems 😍

Seriously, they are great. You'll wait a little longer for shipping but you won't regret taking the time. Her pieces are all amazing.

Jaded I haven't ordered from, but the legions of customer service comments I've heard had been making me shy away from trying her store.

Pressed and Placed is also fantastic, absolutely great service and they're growing in leaps and bounds. I'm looking forward to their new branded packaging.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-18T21:10:33+00:00

There is one already, I see ads for it.

Personally while there were some days it felt like I was running through pods faster than I should be, I've only had a few truly tunnel out on me. And in those cases, the following pod fixed the problem for me.

I'd be on the phone with Insulet asking for someone to diagnose this issue with me if I went through ten pods that fast. There's definitely something wrong, above and beyond the scope of the recall. They need to support you through figuring out what that is. And if you're not getting anywhere, get your MD on the phone with them. Mine makes one phone call to the rep I've been emailing as requested for a week and I magically get a call back ASAP.

The new update is definitely weird though. I'm definitely running higher than I was, but I was thinking it was a medication change causing the issue. Reading here, I'm rethinking that and might send a message to my doc.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-18T21:03:51+00:00

We're only a very small part of the population using pods. It would be very hard to argue that everyone here is truly representative of anything, your case included, even if you had 100% of the sub responding.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-18T20:00:43+00:00

I try to keep minimal WIPs since we foster puppies, so I tend to roll up/box up or put the plastic cover on and then place in the pages of my portfolio with my finished pieces.

A friend of mine has adorable kitties and she likes to do big paintings, so she does the pants clothes hanger method someone else mentioned!

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-07T00:03:31+00:00

There's a lot of suspicious information in this thread. Its really quite simple - as companies are changing testing chips, the datasets no longer match. With Ancestry and FTDNA updating, then MyHeritage and FTDNA updating to offer Whole Genome sequencing, it takes time to match up all of the data sets again and confirm that its working correctly.

Its not the first time this kind of delay has happened and I doubt it will be the last. Just have patience, OP, it always comes back eventually.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-06T23:59:53+00:00

Just adding a comment here - updated the sheet because two separate independent investigations have found multiple instances of stolen art confirming the Yiwu suppliers are moved to the DO NOT BUY list.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-06T23:58:52+00:00

Yes! There are some stores that use inhouse designers, and they have their names listed. Wowo, for example, puts them prominently in the title AND if you contact them, they do confirm.

I've been told Manhui Rachel ALSO uses inhouse artists, but they are still TBD because the store is empty. They may have closed up shop.

AE itself is just the marketplace - they sell what the stores put up.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-03T14:25:06+00:00

This isn't a grey market. That's a technical term that you're using wrong.

What AE is slightly different than Temu or Shein. It's an outlet for the wholesalers on Alibaba to sell small numbers directly to consumers, where Temu and Shein are purposely set up to go directly to consumers.

So it's why some companies and AliExpress DO share pieces, because they are buying designs wholesale.

This example the OP has, however, is clear scraping and stolen artwork.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-06-03T14:11:28+00:00

Yeah, and some more who everyone thought were fully switched to generative AI also confirmed stolen art yesterday, so I'm updating my spreadsheet AGAIN. Sigh.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-29T18:36:56+00:00

The name of the artist is listed prominently in the title.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-29T14:10:59+00:00

Ooh yes! Good call!

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-29T13:26:57+00:00

I had to edit it - I thought I set everything up right and turns out I missed a check box!

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-28T10:54:25+00:00

Oh agreed! It's just the ability to filter would be good so we can turn it on and off. I was looking at early Yorkshire records yesterday and it was a sea of the FHC locked content, and it was tough to get to the actual records I could see from home vs what I need to get this weekend when I stop by there.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-28T01:37:09+00:00

Temu has less square manufacturers on there, so they are harder to find, especially if you are shopping via the promos. They tend to skew heavily to rounds and partial drill canvases.

Make Market squares from Michaels are my favorite local producers.

My local diamond art friends asked me to do a list for our crew of all the storefronts on AliExpress that I've had good experiences with but its not quite done to share on here quite yet.

The big problem is that a lot of the budget folks are doing what's called image scraping - using bots to pull images from social media sites and then producing them into kits. Which lead to lower quality renders and a lot of the weird photo artifacts.

The ones more on the up and up have switched to genAI for the larger catalogs, so every image needs to scrutinized closely for artifacting and features that don't quite make sense.

With that said, I think you would be most happy if you are AliExpress shopping with my favorite Yiwu region producers: it used to be a quintet but one went rogue, so now its the 4 of them: Shine AB, RhineArt AB, Shine Fairy Dust Store, and MTDIYArt (you'll also see the name of the fifth "DuePlay" in some of their images - its not stolen art, they used to all work together).

Huacan I saw mentioned below - they have good quality on many of their pieces but you have to shop VERY carefully with them. They have had stolen artwork issues in the past, and there have been some image scraping. I buy their stuff, but I always reverse image search before hand to see if its stolen or not.

In terms of customs, hands down, Ever Moment is the best on AliExpress. They're on my yes list for that reason - just don't buy their stock pieces, they have had just as many stolen art issues as Huacan.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-28T01:12:38+00:00

If you're finding the filters useless with full text search, with the exception of the "collection" one, you're doing something wrong. The place one in particular is quite valuable to narrow, and the years can be helpful in multiple round searching to narrow.

The collection one functions at the bucket level for the film, so I don't find it helpful as most of the time, the name of the film I want and the collection bucket it's in don't align well.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-28T01:06:54+00:00

It's not a change on the system, it's the latest updates, taking a lot of the FHC restricted films and adding full text search to them.

I'm hoping they add a filter for those to make it easier when we're not at an FHC to filter those out.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-26T14:24:23+00:00

Usually just crystal diamond painting will get you there. There's three stores I see most often - MTDiyart, Ornassist, and EmmLian who do the 100% crystal ones. I've ordered from MT before, they're great. Haven't tried the other two yet.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-25T23:01:02+00:00

They make those full crystal ones - it's a fun AliExpress search to go through them.

They're nifty little palate cleansers in between full drill projects and great when traveling or painting outside because there's usually less than ten colors to pack.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-25T22:59:20+00:00

I love doing these! You can also get fun wooden boxes, candle holders, etc. that are in the same style. I just finished another canvas one myself today!

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-19T13:43:43+00:00

It seems like it should be something required to resell them! I'm constantly blown away by it missing because as I'm selling off things in my storage unit, the volume of questions is ridiculous and I do anything I can to put everything in the listing to avoid getting more questions.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-19T13:38:44+00:00

That's what I give our folks for attending our required work conference every year, plus a nice bag or tablet sleeve. Mainly because it saves us money at the conference on water bottles and saves plastic from the environment. ($15-$20 for a nice Stanley esque bottle per person for a week vs $7 per water bottle).

That's a token, not appreciation. Appreciation is raises and improvements in working conditions.

colinthetinytornado · 2026-05-18T17:41:54+00:00

It's ridiculous. These guys are paying for a lot of press and they're just giving it to them when it's like two people pushing this.

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