To review or not to review....

Was going to pop to one of my local craft shops today so I could blog a quick review of my experience and share it with you. Maybe even take some pictures inside the shop if possible.

Alas, it didn't happen.


*****UPDATE: Sunrise Crafts has since closed. Apparently the business didn't work at the new location, and gradually a number of irate crafters stormed the internet asking where their orders were and why no-one could be found to refund them. Allegedly the company is still trading as an online business under a new name. The lady that ran Sunrise is not responding to any message, even from close friends.*****

I haven't been to Sunrise Crafts since they moved from their old home at a very derelict Wombourne Garden Centre. It was quite a bit further to track them down in their new home at The Mill in Wordsley (Used to take me about 15 mins, now takes almost 30mins) I checked their website and their facebook to make sure it was open. I rang their number and their answering machine confirmed they were open too. (They all said different times of closing, but all confirmed they'd still be open when we got there about 3 p.m. on a Sunday.)

We found their new location. Really out the way, not terribly easy to find. Their website said to "Follow the signs to Sunrise".... we saw none, and it was actually hard to tell they were in the location they were in until we got right up to their door. Tiny poster on the door said "Sunrise Crafts" and their opening times.

It said it was open. It looked shut. We tried the door. It was shut.

Not even a note on the door to say why. No-one answering their phone number to let us know if they'd be back.  It's annoying to get that far and something isn't open, but if there was a note on the door because they'd had an emergency I would have understood, but nope, nada. On the dim chance they locked the door because they were doing a workshop (The lights appeared to be off tho.) they'd pop a note on the door to lock loudly wouldn't they? Listen out for customers knocking?

The result of this though is not just one missed customer, it's all of one customer's business, cos I won't risk going their for it to be shut again, so probably won't go again at all. I won't be pestering my friends to go visit it, so their money is gone too. I will probably tell my friends who ask about it that it's not reliably open, so more customer possibly lost. Next time I will pop to their competitor OR just the big chain shops, because it's too far to go to a company who don't care enough about their customers to pop a note on their door when they are shut!

Found on the website that shop updates will be on Facebook and Twitter! So realised I should have checked twitter too! Guess what? Also nothing about being shut! Sigh.

This very limited review is now over. They do a lot of online sales these days, as a business, maybe their online customer service would be better.

Update - 11th June 2018

I posted on their facebook page to say what had happened and they replied with:

"I am so sorry this has happened, unfortunately we had a family emergency and had to close. It was unexpected and we where not very well prepared. Under normal circumstances we are open 7 days a week. My sincere apologies."

Thing is, it's very hard to argue with "family emergency" isn't it? I suggested they made a sign to pop on the door in case they had to dash out for another one. :/

Cult Pens!

After having made a blog post giving a company a negative review, I thought I should do a positive one and balance out the blog karma!

***this post is not sponsored and is purely my personal opinion and experience***

Recently I have been getting through an extraordinary amount of polychromo pencils. (Less so since the arrival of my new Westcott Ipoint Orbit battery operated pencil sharpener - recommended!).

After trying several places online, my friend Helen recommended Cult Pens to me. When I popped across to compare prices they were cheaper and on that particular occasion had a marvellous 3 for 2 offer on Faber Castell! Although this offer is now over, there often have great offers on you can take part in. (It's a free grip pencil set at the moment! Really nice quality.)

So here is the link to Polychromo Pencils at £1.19 each! 

Also, spend more than £10 and you get free p&p, (Over £15 for the current offer pencil grip offer) and it's same day dispatch so things normally come next day. (And often with a extra free gift too!)

My need to test customer service has been pretty limited. The once I ordered a large amount of white polychromo pencils and they weren't in stock, they emailed me very quickly and told me they were going to hold my order until they had enough to fulfill it in one go. The time I forgot to add the free gift to my basket on check out (it clearly says to do it, I was just being a numpty) they were super polite on email and offered to send it to me anyway, with no extra charge for the p&p. On the main, the service has been so excellent, it really hasn't been necessary to do anything other than order.

The pencils come in a bubble wrap envelope, and unlike other suppliers, I don't often find the core has been damaged. I would prefer a bit more protection to the pencil, seeing as dropping a polychromo can often crack the interior, but even just in a jiffy, they seem to be fine. And as my p&p was free, perhaps expecting more wrapping is greedy!

So review over! If you are a pen geek they have an amazing selection of pens as well as the pencils I visit for. There a quite a few foreign makes of writing/crafting items and... well it's worth a look if stationery shopping makes you happy, like me :)

Online Shopping & Service Score = 10/10

*sigh*

It’s actually with a heavy heart that I feel the need to make this post. It’s not often customer service is so bad I want to warn people away from a company, but this time I think I should.

I am talking about a company called Sprinkle Twinkle Ltd sometimes known as Sprinkle Twinkle 24 (online).

*****11/05/2019 UPDATE. The links for Sprinkle Twinkle no longer work because the company went bust in 2017/2018. Apparently they are now running a care business. A lot of people were left with orders and refunds owing, apparently they stopped responding to people entirely shortly before going bust. Their facebook page is covered in bad reviews and irate customers, they didn't even delete it when it went out of business, not a surprise.*****

I can’t say they were ever anything other than polite with me, they were always quite quick to reply but if I tell you that I placed an order on the 24^th March, and after a long chain of emails they still couldn’t provide me with a eta on my order by the 1^st June. 68 days later!

I believe they have changed some of the policies since I ordered, but even though items appear to be in stock they actually are not, they wait for a group of orders to come in and then they place their order with the supplier in America. I only know they do this because of an order I placed with them at the end of last year that took 3 months to arrive because of “customs issues” and the delay in placing the original order. Basically they had waited a long time to place the order due to the Christmas rush and them relocating their company and then it was further delayed by customs, so a 3 month wait. I didn’t think this was the normal amount of time it took to get things from them; I thought it was a one off!

I place my order two months in advance of when I needed it. As I shared with them via email, this was because I was working out it would take 4 weeks for them to place order, 5 days for the American Supplier to post, 3 weeks for customs to hold things up, 2 days for the item to be posted to me. Two months seemed like plenty of time to get things done. It takes less than that amount of time to order from Supermart USA and Chinese suppliers via ebay.

In their initial update to the order they themselves state:

Due to the volume that we order we would expect a worse case scenario to be around 3 weeks from your order date. We do now order on a weekly basis from the larger suppliers and this should cut down waiting times on delivery to our customers however there can be cases where our suppliers cannot complete every order due to them not having stock in to supply us, in this situation we will make you aware as soon as we know.

So they were actually predicting a date far sooner than I had imagined when I placed the order.

On the 2^nd of June after emails saying there was still no eta I cancelled the order, and on the 6^th of June they eventually refunded me. They didn’t bother to follow that up with another email, or reply to the email I had made asking them to cancel, or the one chasing the cancellation when they still hadn’t refunded me a few days later.

So yes, I got refunded in the end, but I think the reason I still couldn’t get an eta was because the items had still not been ordered. They discouraged me from contacting Lawn Fawn (who I assumed were the supplier for the goods) because they said goods were not coming from them, but actually I think it was because I would have discovered the order hadn’t been placed, or hadn’t been placed 2 months ago, but recently.

The co-owner of the company did ring me personally and left a short sharp message on my answer phone, at the time I was hoping it was going to be an apology and an eta for my order, but after an email later I actually think he was ringing because he was cross that I had offered to ring Lawn Fawn and chase them about the delay.

I am not ordering from them again, and I am actively going to discourage people from using them and to try somewhere else instead. There is no other time when I have to wait longer than 2 months for something I order online, even a sofa would arrive sooner than that. It’s not on, it’s not reasonable to offer no eta when it’s requested and I hope Lawn Fawn realise, the company in the UK representing them and their products is performing so awfully.

Baked with Love.

Been dying to use this stamp set by Lawn Fawn called "Baked With Love" (Helen got it for me for Christmas! Crafting friends are the best!). It's ridiculously cute! I saw this gorgeous card by Chari Moss and decided to use the basic layout to make a card using the same set. Being very careful to credit her on this, her work is amazeballs.

Stamps - Lawn Fawn Baked with Love
Coloured with Copics.
Papers: Lawn Fawn 6x6 Perfectly Plaid Fall.

Added: Stickles and Glossy Accents.
( A good match to this Lawn Fawn font, that I used inside the card, is CAC Pinafore.)

Mini Review!

This card also gave me the chance to use my new "Press to Impress" stamping platform from crafts-too.com. It's basically a much cheaper version of a Misti, but seems just as awesome.
Here are a couple of photos of how I used it for this card.

Placed all the elements on the section of the card that I wanted to stamp, including the clear cling stamp greeting, straight and central, where I wanted it to go.

Then I closed the lid to pick up the stamps. Inked them up in black ink and then closed the lid again to stamp the greeting! This is brilliant for so many reasons, and reduces the "is it straight" angst and the "omg a bit didnt stamp well, can stamping it perfectly over the top to fill in the gap?". I am sure other crafters must have faced that a few times! It's not just me is it?

And the result! And as you can expect, it stamped perfectly first time, and I didn't need to redo it, but if I had, it would have been easy peasy! :) I am sold on this gadget. Worth every penny. (I am not handy enough to make one from dollar/pound store products but there are plenty of people that do if you want to track down how to make one yourself!).

Craft Kit Review - Turtle Family Pom Pom Kit by Hobbycraft

Just trying something a bit new on the blog, a kit review! A kind friend got me this as a gift, I think because she could see how disastrously wrong it could go, lol! But actually, given how badly my adhoc makes can look, I think she will be surprised ;)

Turtle Family Pom Pom Kit from Hobbycraft. Currently £1.25 on sale.(January 2017) It's also a kit of THREE not FOUR as advertised on their website.

So its this kit, billed as " All you need to create a pom pom work of art"  for ages 3 and up under adult supervision.

I indeed could have done with some adult supervision, and perhaps a few plasters... I can't help having an attention span too short to remember that my glue gun will be HOT!... doh! :)

So it does say you will also need glue, but in my opinion you actually need....

A glue gun (one glue stick refill), some tweezers (so you don't burn yourself sticking on the eyes with the glue gun), a thin cylindrical object and a slightly thicker one (for the legs), some wire cutters and pliers (to fold over the ends of the pipe cleaners if you want them to be non lethal with children) and some newspaper to protect your work area.

There is a picture diagram on the back to explain how to assemble the largest turtle, and then you are left to use your initiative and the photo to assemble the two smaller ones. The diagram and photo are enough instructions for you to get the theory, though in practice, it takes a fair amount of dexterity and a lot of holding things in place and waiting if you don't use a magical glue gun.

So here is the "compare with their picture" photo.

Not too bad? My shells aren't as neat and even as theirs for sure, but on the whole, they kind of look the same.

So they took about an hour to make. Everything else apart from the tools I listed above are included, and I had an odd spare pipe cleaner and pom pom at the end. (Not many left overs if you make a mistake along the way.)

It was fun to make, but quite taxing, not remotely suitable to make with a three year old, I'd think an 11 year old would be pretty worn out by making one, let alone three. Maybe a project for a crafty parent/aunt/uncle who can complete it in their own time when the child is bored after ten minutes?

They look quite nice, and are pretty robust with the glue gun factor, but I dunno what to do with them. I might add on a wire and pop them in a plant pot to cheer up a sad houseplant this spring!

Tiger Pen Haul

Bit of a haul update from Tiger Pens! I haven't used them before but they have been recommended to me lots of times, particularly for buying single copics (rather than sets) and for their reasonably priced copic refills.

The service was excellent. Good comms and quick about delivery. The pens came loose in a jiffy bag but I suppose they didn't really need anymore wrapping than that. The choice of pens on the site is immense. Would happily recommend them myself now too.

I also couldn't resist three of their "try it for ten pence" Uni-ball pens, we get through loads of writing pens in my house...they seem to be transported to work and never return.  I've yet to test the writing pens properly but they all seem super smooth and lovely to use.

As you can see, it was getting jolly hard to colour in anything pale green with my copics!! It's hard to know with copics when it is the right time to buy a refill, just refill the pen once at the shop, or just buy a new pen?

I decided to use the "how many empties of that colour have you got?" theory and it seemed I needed only to buy "Pale Blue Grey" as a refill. (it's the chunky looking grey thing at the bottom of the photo.) Every other pen colour had only needed to be replaced once. I use pale blue grey as my go to shadow colour on almost every pic so it's not surprising it runs out first.

I did try taking my empties to a local craft shop for a refill but it was a waste of time, it didn't last more than ten mins when I started to use it again. Am not sure if it's just this one shop or if it's a problem with refilling in general, but now I have my own refill I can find out for myself!