Product review: CrateJoy ScribeDelivery subscription box

The following subscription box was gifted to me by CrateJoy. All opinions are my own.

A few weeks ago, the lovely folks at CrateJoy sent one of their fantastic subscriptions boxes compiled by Scribe Delivery. Inside the box was a Rhodia Meeting notebook, UniBall Signo Ultra Micro 307 gel pen, JStory Stick-up weekly calendar, and an Uni Mitsubishi Penmanship writing pencil (triangular body) 4B.

Rhodia Meeting Book

Have I told you that I’m a bit of a closet fan of Rhodia? I use their grid A4 notebook for my handwriting practice, so when this notebook arrived, I knew it was going to be special. Rhodia has, hands down, the most exquisite paper and this notebook didn’t disappoint. The notebook allocates two pages per meeting with one page divided into three sections (section a the top for information, and underneath is divided into two parts, one for notes and the other for actions), and the other side in two sections (notes plus actions). It came at the perfect time of the year with the start of the school year and I had several planning meetings coming up. Unfortunately, I forgot all about it, but my lovely husband picked it up thinking that it was just a plain notebook he could use at work. Turns out that it was more useful for him than he had originally thought and helped with organising tasks at work. The example you see in the picture above are some of my meeting notes transposed into the notebook. Even though I’ve had little experience using the notebook, after writing out my own notes in the pages, I can see the Actions column being really useful for highlighting tasks that have come out of meeting discussions. The only thing with me is that I tend to use several pages when I’m in meetings and it usually involves mind maps and actions scrawled all over the place, which I eventually highlight and then migrate to my Runsheet collection.

JStory Stick-up Weekly Calendar

I was absolutely stoked when this arrived in the subscription box. You have no idea how difficult it is to find this brand stocked anywhere in Australia! I ended up splitting it in half and giving the other half to my other half. This desk planner sat near my laptop and was the repository for every single task that needed to be completed for the Brisbane Planner Markets. Super handy and kept me organised throughout the whole process.

UniBall Signo Ultra Micro 307 Gel Pen

Just wow. This is a fantastic pen. The ultra fine nib provides such wonderful precision in letterforms and allows me to write in my tiny writing without losing much detail. I use highlighters for my planning and journalling, so depending on the tooth and quality of the paper, I had some feathering and ghosting, and the drying time varied, but otherwise this is a top notch pen. I’ve definitely added it to my favourite pen bundle, which I’ll share with you all in an upcoming post on my tools of choice for handwriting and planning. In the meantime, enjoy the pen swatch in the Rhodia Meeting Book.

Uni Mitsubishi Penmanship writing pencil (triangular body) 4B

Now I’ve been using the Uni Mitsubishi pens for a long time for my drawing needs, and I was surprised that they actually also made pencils. This is a great drawing Pencil with enough softness in it to get some wonderful gradients on 110gsm drawing cartridge paper. The 4B would have to be a choice softness of lead for my tonal drawings when I’m planning art work. I’ve added this to my drawing artillery and can’t wait to give it more mileage when I carve out more time to sketch.

Overall Impressions

For the value of the subscription box, this was actually pretty good. The ScribeDelivery subscription is $US29, and when I did a bit of a search online for the individual items, it almost matches this value, give or take a few cents, if that. Definitely worth it, if this is the calibre of products that come to your mailbox every month.

If you’re interest in subscribing to any of CrateJoy’s awesome subscription boxes, head on over to my previous blog post for some ideas.

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