During Drama #1 (Mum-Covid-to-Aged-Care) I spontaneously bought a second hand dip pen and ink set on eBay that didn’t arrive until a month after I reported it missing and a few weeks after I’d bought the set new and at full price. During Drama #2, having distracted myself with a lot of fun and silly YouTube videos of artists and crafters trying out art hacks, products and subscription boxes, I decided to try out one of the latter.

I did do a bit of a shop around, comparing past boxes for each subscription and watching unboxings. The craft ones were interesting but it was the art materials ones that appealed the most. I tried to sign up to ArtSnacks twice but the order form wouldn’t work. Then I went to the site of Scrawlrbox, but that ones is based in the UK but they were having problems with international postage. The next one I tried was Palletful Packs. Figuring it was better to test things out by ordering something before committing to a subscription, I ordered one previous subscription pack, and a pack of brushes.

By the time I realised I should have checked the postage, it was too late. Oh boy. A friend who has a US craft box subscription says hers only costs $15 in postage and I’ll be generous and assume that’s US dollars. This order cost me US$63 in postage. More than the more expensive of the two packs cost.

It was, however, worth it. I can’t imagine buying all the contents for under the $200 for boxes and postage, mostly because that’s a LOT of brushes. The acrylic inks, markers, single brush and cute mini watercolour pads were in the past subscription box, the rest was in the brush box. I was expecting the brush cleaner to be the mini version, but it’s full size.

So I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got, but I’m not sure about subscribing when I don’t know how much that’d cost in postage. There’s another art subscription box that looks pretty good and it says $15 for postage to Australia, so I might try one of the previous pack from that before deciding whether I want to go the full sub.