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Mystery Reward

I just finished putting in a bunch of overtime on the day job so that I could write two weeks ahead of schedule (a hurricane season habit.) This means working eight to ten hours a day plus weekends to produce double quota for two weeks, and it's not easy.

That's why I give myself a reward when I go above and beyond like this. I was tempted to order Mary Maxim's Mystery Box so I could review it for the blog. Only the price plus shipping was a bit more than I wanted to spend, so I went looking elsewhere. Then I got an offer from my shopping platform that made the shipping for the box basically free, so I went ahead and ordered it.

The order just arrived, so let's dive in and see what I got.

Here's everything: fourteen full-size skeins of yarn, two crochet hooks and four patterns.

The London Kaye crochet hooks are plastic, have twisted handles, and came in two sizes: small (9mm) and large (20mm). I don't think I have a 20mm hook so that's pretty nice to get.

I got one skein of LionBrand Summer Nights superfine yarn in the color Castaway. This is a 82% acrylic 18% polyester fingering weight gradient yarn with a lovely silver metallic thread in the twist, definitely something I'll enjoy testing out.

Next are three skeins of Lion Brand Comfy Cotton in the color Chai Latte (love the names of these yarns.) This is a 50% cotton 50% polyester DK weight gradient yarn in a twisty conglom of light blue, light pink, light gold, light gray, dark gray and white.

Two skeins of LionBrand Skein Tones in the colro Walnut also came in the box. These are 100% antipilling worsted weight acrylic that I believe are mainly used by amigurumi makers. I love the softness of this yarn, very light and smooth.

Altogether I got eight skeins of Serenity Chunky Tweed; two in the color Mulberry, three in the color Aran and three in the color carbon. This is a 97% acrylic 3% viscose bluky weight yarn that has tweed flecks of different colors in it and is super pretty. I bet all of them together would make a nice throw like this one.

Finally there were four patterns, all of which looked neat. I checked the web site and found that most of these yarns are no longer for sale; the Serenity Chunky Tweed has been discounted but none of the colors I got were offered. This is not unusual for mystery boxes and I'm fine with it.

With the platform discount I paid $30.12 for this mystery box, which works out to about $2.15 per skein. It's a great value if you can get it discounted like I did, and the variety is super nice. This is probably my second favorite mystery box of all time, and I'm looking forward to trying out all the yarns.

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