The Red Box - All Creatures Great and Small - a treasury of samplers volume II

This is my story about the order that I made on Jan 31^st, 2026, at 7 am.

The box is curated by Nicola Parkman of Hands Across the Seas, and it contains 14 sampler charts and 7 items that Nicola personally selected to do along with the patterns. I am looking forward to this box arriving after it leaves England and arrives here in Canada. This is the fourth box that Nicola has done but the first one that I finally decided to get, and I am looking forward to receiving it.

The experience of getting this box was a bit of a roller coaster because of course everyone was trying to get their box ordered as quickly as they could, so it meant that the system was rather slow. Also, because I was making a foreign purchase, I had an issue with my credit card but that was resolved quickly (needed to reply to text from bank asking if I was making this purchase). Once the credit card number was entered (after the text confirmation) it did take a while for the order to be processed but by 7:40 am I had received an email that my order had gone through.

Now the waiting really begins because it needs to be shipped and arrive at my door. Here is the timeline of how things went:

• Feb 3^rd – receive email that the order is now complete and receive the tracking number for the order.
• Feb 4^th – the box is received by Royal Mail and now the actual tracking begins
• Feb 5^th – the box leaves England so it is getting closer.
• Feb 6^th – the box arrives in Canada and now must go through customs so more waiting and of course it’s Friday, so more waiting is going to have to happen.
• Feb 6^th – checked the tracking and now the system says it will be delivered on Monday, Feb 9^th between 1:30 and 5:30 pm. I really do hate weekends but otherwise it might have been here on the 7^th.
• Feb 9th - the status changed to out for delivery at around 10:30 am and then the waiting began. Of course, it said it should be delivered by 5:30 pm so that was a long wait. Well, at 5:30 I still hadn't received the knock on the door so was getting a little worried. Well at 5:34 the knock came and I immediately ran to the door yelling, "I know who this is and he is holding a box for me."

So, the box has arrived and I have gone through all the contents but it is going to take me some time to actually looking at everything that I received and figure out which charts I want to stitch immediately and what patterns I will do a little later.

As this is a box that was a mystery I cannot show you anything that I received yet, but I can say that I am so happy with the contents of the box and am looking forward to figuring out which patterns I will stitch in which order.