Of #HarryPotter Boxes, #Crafting Kits, The #KindleFire8, Neighbours, Organization, And #Sewing Projects

Those who know me well won't be surprised to hear this, but... I did end up signing up for the Harry Potter box. I wasn't sure if I should, so Kelly made the choice for me, and signed me up for it. It asks you to pick a house, because it customizes some of the items based on your house. We picked Ravenclaw, because that's what Pottermore says I'm in. The sorting hat has put me in Ravenclaw in the past too, when I was sorted on the old Harry Potter site that used to exist. My first Harry Potter box will arrive any day now.

I've had lots of fun post this week.

On Monday - as in October 15th - my first Mr Maker box arrived. It's got kits to make both a pizza and a doughnut. Not real ones. Ones made of foam that are either decorative or for use as play food, depending on the situation or who has them. There's also an activity book and a sticker in it. I'm not sure whether I'll keep the sticker or not, but I'm planning on collecting up the activity books, and sending them to one of the people I know who can actually use them with a child. By the way, if you like the sound of the Mr Maker box, and decide to sign up, can you do so using this link, please? In theory, if you do, you get your first box for free (though they still charge you the £1 postage) and I get a half price box for refering you. I know the free thing works, because I got my first box for just the cost of shipping, having used a similar sort of link from the subscription boxes website.

Also, the nice people who do the Makerly Crafts boxes sent me one to review for my blog. It arrived on Wednesday. I'm now signed up to get their boxes regularly, and will be posting a detailed review of the box they sent me some time soon. The kind of craft their kit is for each month varies, and this month the kit in it is a quilling kit. A skull themed one, in honor of Halloween. I'd never tried quilling before, though I'd heard of it, and my Nan (Dad's Mother) has tried it. Anyway, more on that soon.

I also checked out the My Gecko Box kits. But I only liked one or two of the things they do, so I won't be subscribing to that one. It looks like a great box for teaching children, but not so much for someone like me who's just looking for some fun craft kits and goodies to enjoy each month. I did order their owl sewing kit and heart dream catcher kit though, since I liked the look of them, and they didn't cost much. Those arrived on Friday. I'm calling them an early birthday present to myself.

Then there was my early birthday and Christmas present from Kelly. You see, on Monday evening, it took me three hours to get my Kindle to open a book and start reading, and then it wouldn't read for long. For a while now, it's been slow loading books nine times out of ten. It's also been doing this thing where it starts reading a book, and then stops and closes the book and returns to the home screen. It does the same with apps sometimes too. I'll be using it, and suddenly I'm back on the home screen. My Dad had another kind of tablet that did the same kinds of things shortly before it died. We suspect that's what's happening here. In all fairness to it, I've now had it for four years, and it really is used a lot. As in, pretty much every single day (there has been the odd day I haven't turned it on to read, but those days are few and far between). Well, at least that helped me with deciding what I want for my birthday and Christmas from Kelly. Plus, the newer Kindles have more storage space on them to start with, as well as a mini SD slot, so I have more book storage on my new one. Silver linings and all that. *wink* Yes, I've now got a new one. My old Kindle was a Kindle Fire 7. The new one is a Kindle Fire 8. More storage, faster processor, slightly different size, better sound quality. Other than that, it's basically the same in my opinion. Well, other than the fact my old one isn't working properly any more, and it was a purpleish-pink colour, where as my new one works properly, and is blue. Yes, I could have had red, but we'd just signed me up to the Harry Potter box, so I felt like sticking with Ravenclaw colours. Oh, and there's the fact it has a "restart" option, which I keep accidentally pressing when I go to press the "power off" button, which is really annoying, though it's something to do with me, and not the Kindle's fault (I know it is, because Kelly can press the right button, and he's not very good with touch screen as a rule). Anyway, it was meant to arrive on Friday or Saturday, but actually came on Wednesday, which was an excellent thing as far as I was concerned. Kelly got me a case for it too, since my old Kindle's case would be too small. That's blue as well, to match the Kindle, and also arrived on Wednesday.

Like I said, I've had lots of fun post this week!

I also had an iron come. My Mam is still laughing about my needing to get an iron. You see, I always refused to get one. I can iron, but I don't see the point in ironing laundry, so I didn't see any reason to own an iron. I've always refused to get one, and wouldn't let my Mam buy me one. Anyway, the craft kits in the boxes come with everything you'll need to do the kits, except for items they assume every home will have. Items like irons. So, we start checking out what we need to do for the Autumn themed table runner, and it turns out we need an iron to make the special paper stuff become sticky, so it can help hold the fabric leaves to the runner. Except, as already mentioned, we didn't have an iron. Now, we could have improvised. Skipped that step and just gone on to the stitching part. But the leaves will be more secure with the sticky stuff as well as the stitching. Plus, we do want to do these kits as close to how they're meant to be done as possible. So, we brought an iron. It arrived on Thursday. It's not a fancy one. It's just a cheap little travel iron. After all, I only want it for crafting. Hey, just because I now own an iron, doesn't mean I'm about to start ironing my laundry. *wink* Here's a photo of my iron, for the benifit of anyone who might want to see it:



In other news:

We already have someone new moving in downstairs. Kelly's spoken to him some, and so have one of our other neighbours, and he seems nice. Plus, he was there a couple of times when Lilie was racing around like a maniac when I was playing with her, or she was playing in general, and he didn't complain about that, and hasn't complained that we walk about too loudly, even if we have some reason why we're walking around at night (such as bathroom trips). So that's a great start. Let's hope he stays this nice, since we've decided not to move now that nasty neighbour is gone.

Yes, we were still planning on moving. In fact, that was the plan right up until this past Friday. But then we had a long chat about it, and decided we didn't really want to move. We no longer have to, now that nasty neighbour has been moved, so the real reason for continuing to move now would be the stairs. Kelly doesn't consider them a problem for him, and I don't struggle with them so much now the dizziness isn't an issue, and will likely struggle with them even less again when my body gets used to exercise again. So we're just going to stay here.

When we were packing boxes before, we weren't paying much attention to how we stored them. The result was a mess of boxes blocking our access to half the stuff in the spare room - the room that's officially meant to be our home office. So, not this past weekend, but the one before, we started organizing the room better. That was what I was doing that meant I didn't have more than a few moments here and there to snatch to make a start on one of my craft projects. We didn't finish sorting it that weekend, and started doing more during this past week. We started doing it with being able to access stuff to pack it in mind, and ended up doing it with restoring the room to its intended use in mind instead. It's still a bit chaotic in there, despite our having done more in there this past weekend, but at least we can actually get in there now, rather than leaving the room to the spiders who - judging by all of the cobwebs - considered us not going in there to be an invitation for them to claim the room as their own. The spiders won't be pleased to hear this, but we'll be continuing to sort things out in there this week, and reclaiming the room from the spiders in the process.

I guess it's a good thing we never got around to packing all the boxes in the end, because we now need to unpack the ones we did get around to packing. We're making a point to properly organize things as we put them on the shelves this time though. We'll need to get some more shelves, and there are things in our home we need to replace, but we already knew that was the case, since it's something we'd have to do whether we move or not. We'll use the money we'd saved towards moving to make a start on sorting that, since we won't be using it for moving after all.

Anyway, in between all the unpacking and organization - and evicting of spiders - I managed to get about half the purse kit completed during last weekend. I even managed to watch some TV, including a new to me movie, while doing part of it on the Sunday (I'll be telling you about the new to me movie in another post). I managed to finish the purse this past weekend, so here are a couple of photos of it:



The inside fabric isn't the same one the Sew Mine Box people gave us for the inside in the kit. The one they gave us was white with purple-ish polkadots. But I had a bit of trouble with the template at first, and ended up using a different fabric. They would have replaced it if requested, but I didn't think it was fair to ask them when it was an issue caused by me not being able to see what I was doing, so we replaced it instead. We couldn't find identical fabric at short notice, so went with a solid purple instead.

Anyway, I'd planned to also do the quilling project this past weekend. I was going to do that one, and see if I could start the Autumn themed table runner too, though I was doubtful I'd get to the table runner. But time got away from me, so I didn't do more than start the quilling kit. I hope to have both the quilling and table runner projects done by this time next week. I'd like to be able to post about them around Halloween, especially given their themes. I might work on the quilling one on and off through the week, instead of waiting until the weekend, thus freeing up a bit more time to work on the runner over the weekend. We'll see what actually ends up happening though.