HAED stands for Heaven and Earth Designs and is a company that sells cross stitch patterns. They don’t sell any complete Diamond Painting kits. If you want to turn a HAED pattern into a Diamond Painting you need to do it yourself. To do that you buy the cross stitch pattern from HAED and then you order the canvas and the drills from another site, (like AliExpress or smithsbeads.co.uk). So when someone says they are doing a HAED Diamond Painting they are using a cross stitch pattern and a blank Diamond Painting canvas. The process is the same as when doing counted cross stitch. But instead of embroidery thread you use square drills.
How to make out what size of canvas you need for HAED Diamond Painting
The adhesive canvas for Diamond Painting can be compared to 10 count Aida for cross stitch. To find out how big canvas you will need for your pattern you need to multiply the amount of stitches for height and width by 0,25 cm. The number 0,25 comes from that a square drill is 0,25×0,25 cm. For example if you have a pattern that has 500 stitches height and 200 stitches width you will use the following formula: 500×0,25 = 125 cm and 200×0,25 = 50 cm. In other words the part of the canvas that will be filled with drills is 125 cm in height and 50 cm in width. You should add an edge that is about 10 cm so that you can frame it when done. The 10 cm edge shouldn’t have the adhesive on it. Remember to round up to the closest integer. So if you get 125,7 cm you would want a canvas that is 126 cm, you should do the same if you get 125,2 cm.
In my example I would need to order a canvas that is 125 cm in height and 50 cm in width. Plus an addition 10 cm edge without adhesive. So in totalt the canvas would be 145 cm in height and 70 cm in width. In other words 10 cm above image + 125 cm + 10 cm below image = 145 cm. 10 cm to the left + 50 cm + 10 cm to the right = 70 cm.
How to figure out how many square drills you need for HAED Diamond Painting
When you buy a cross stitch pattern from HAED you will get a list with what DMC colors you should use as well as how many stitches should be sewn for each color. You can use that list to figure out how many square drills you will need of each color. One cross stitch stitch is equal to one drill. So that mean if you need for example 50 stitches of 310 then you will need 50 drills of 310. Unfortunately you cant orders just 50 drills, since they come prepacked. The seller either goes by weight and the bags are in 2 gram, 5 gram or 10 gram. The 2 gram bag contains about 300 drills, 5 gram is 700 and 10 gram is 1400. If they don’t go by weight the bags often come in the size you can see on the picture below.
So if you need 50 drills of 310, then you need to buy either 1 bag with 2 gram in it or 1 bag with approximately 200 drills. You can always use the left over drills for other projects. Note that not every seller has the bigger bags. So if you need more than 200 drills of a color you need to buy multiple bags.
Good to know
If you want you can always use these calculations to make other cross stitch patterns to Diamond Painting, not just HAED. As long as you know the amount of stitches for both width and height as well as how many stitches are needed for each color. You do need to remember that a cross stitch pattern in Diamond Painting format tends to be quite big. Since in the cross stitch world you can choose which sized fabric you want to stitch on. If you stitch on 18 count it will be smaller than one stitched on 14 count. The Diamond Painting canvas only has one size, which is about 10 drills per inch.
So for example a pattern that is 50 stitches in height and 50 stitches in width would on 18 count Aida be about 2 3/4 inches by 2 3/4 inches. If you convert the same pattern to Diamond Painting it would be about 5 inches by 5 inches. So the difference is quite big.
If you want to order a HAED cross stitch pattern you can do it on their homepage. Which you can find here: HAED.
There is also a Facebook group were you can find more information about HAED Diamond Painting. You can find it here: HAED Diamond Painting.