How to evenly cover one object with instances of another? I am trying to cover a simple, but angled shape with jewels. 

I need the jewels to evenly cover the shape, but I also need them to rotate with the normals/face angles of the base object.   

As you can see from the picture the grid setting in Particle emitter lays the jewels out perfectly, but I can't rotate them with the faces normals - and the hair emitter rotates them perfectly but I can't align them evenly enough???   

I have tried the tesselate addon, various array set ups... Is there a way to combine the rotation ability of the hair with the grid layout of the emitter?
In edit mode, subdivide your mesh a few times, so that the vertices are where you want your jewels to be placed. Then make note of how many vertices your object has (info bar at the top right). Using hair particles, set the number of particles to the number of vertices, make sure even distribution is enabled, and set the emitter to be verts, not faces/volume. That will place a jewel on each vertex, giving you perfectly even distribution, as well as correct rotation.