Wintertime at A Doll's Life For Me

Wintertime at A Doll's Life For Me
My sister is the best Christmas gift I've ever gotten.

Monday, August 7, 2017

Elsa and Anna's Mini Reviews: Yoobi Mini Supply Kit

"What do you think She's doing?" Anna whispered, her breath a tickle on my face.
"It looks like it's for us," I said. "Let's hope it's good."
We first noticed the plastic bag She was currently carrying over to the dresser a long time ago. It came with the spring, with She and her sister choosing with mixed emotions which pieces to take. They were doll clothes, fitted for 12'' dolls, Barbies, as they were typically called, and handmade by their grandmother. We haven't seen their grandmother since November, but more of her stuff kept coming into the house.
Not that we minded. It was August now, the hottest month of the year, and a change of clothes would make things a lot cooler. Besides, where else could you get something as unique and heartfelt as handmade clothes?


Sure enough, She took Anna and I from the dresser and sat us down, propped up against the pillow on her bed. She choose an outfit for each of us to wear from the plastic bag and dressed us according to our favorite colors: green and orange for Anna, and blue and white for me. Surprisingly, they all fit really well, except the hoods to the capes we were too small to fit over our heads.
She only forgot one thing... to put us back on the dresser whenever She left again.
Of course, we were swamped anyways. Everyone wanted to see our new outfits or express their jealousy. And, in Idina's case, observe the stitch work for possible future projects.
"Um... Anna, your skirt is... interesting." I said, suppressing a giggle. It clashed terribly with her cape.


"I like it," she insisted, but still whipping her cape off. I did the same. "And now we have new things to wear for the summer."
"Yeah... hey, what's that?" Something else had caught my eye, in a plastic bag but not more clothes.
"She's school supplies," Loki explained. "We should probably stay out of it."
I wrinkled my nose. "School supplies?"
"Yes. Pencils, highlighters, folders, notebooks, locker magnets, anything She would need to start a new school year."
"Could school really be that soon?"
"It starts this month," Loki kicked the bedding as he left with the others. "Shame, really. She'll be gone most of the day now."
Anna shook her head. "Shame for the bag, too. I love stationary."


"Then you're just as dorky as I am," I laughed. "Let's have a look, shall we?"
"No, Elsa, we really shouldn't..."
But Anna couldn't stop me. Nobody could when there was something to be explored.
There was, I suppose, typical things you'd need for school in that bag. Two three-subject spiral notebooks, a case of mechanical pencils, and a new planner. I was about to give up until I saw a small blue box, too small to be ordinary.
"Hey, look at this!" I gave the blue plastic box to Anna.
"There's a lot inside... but definitely not human sized things."
"She always liked tiny things," Anna flipped it over and I read the back. "It says... Yoobi Mini Supply Kit."


"Yoobi?"
I shrugged. "Doesn't matter. It's a mini supply kit! It should be just the right size for us."
"But Elsa, these are She's things. Loki said not to bother them."
"Yeah, but do you really think this kit is for her?" I waved it around. "It's too small anyways. Let's test it out. We can put it back after."
Anna looked fidgety. "Well..." I almost had her. "Okay. Fine. I've got an idea for what to do with that."
"Blog post?" I asked.
"Blog post," Anna nodded. "A series, actually. It can be the two of us reviewing miniatures. Like the little tea set we have, or this supply kit. So people reading this can see what we think of the product, and if we give it a good review, they might buy it, too."
"Good idea. Too bad we're not getting paid to sponsor them."
"Okay, but what would we do with the money?"
"Buy more miniature things?" I suggested.
Anna laughed. "Come on, we can set up a background over here under the window."


And we did just that.
We thought thid photo would work well for the August header blog picture as well.


When we first opened the kit, we saw a tape dispenser, a pair of scissors, a staple remover, a hole punch, a pencil sharpener, and a stapler, all tiny and turquoise.


The tape roll went first. Anna had brought over some plain computer paper for us to experiment with, so really all that could we done with that was putting some tape on it. Which... wasn't very exciting. But the tape roll is really cute. I imagine it's difficult for humans to use, but for us it was much easier.


Unfortunately, we immediately had some complaints about the tape roll. First, when you pull at the tape, it tends to make a "bumping" noise when you're rolling it out, and as a result, the tape you get is not clear, and instead has white stripes all over, which you might be able to see in this picture. Second, the ridges to cut the tape on the dispenser are not metal, but plastic, which is sort of dull and useless. You have to pull on it just right to get it to cut without stretched out the tape roll. Other than that, it works just like a normal tape roll, and we folded over this part of the computer paper to demonstrate.


We tested out the scissors next. You may recognize these from my Ten Tips to Being a Good Doll Blogger post when Anna had them. The blades were a little sticky, (sticky in the way they rubbed against each-other, nothing to do with the tape) but that could just be the ones in our set. Besides that, they cut through paper surprisingly well. The scissors were all blue plastic, except the pivot pin in the center and blades were both metal.


The plastic feels high quality, but still delicate just because of the size. But it does do a good job of covering all the unsafe parts except where the blades are exposed to cut, so it has that going for it. And, of course we had to make paper snowflakes with them! (The picture of that is at the bottom of this post.)


Since it seemed kind  of useless to use a staple remover without any staples in the paper yet, we moved on to the stapler. I think She would be most excited with this item since She uses staplers a lot of the time. There were ten sets of replacement staples that came with the set, so the joy we had to face was loading them in the stapler.


There are also many issues with this one. The stapler stands fine on its own, but I've seen humans with their human-sized staplers punching down on the lever instead of carefully clipping the end to a stack of paper. Even when used normally, it refuses to work at all. We tried multiple times with accordion-folded paper, only three layers, and the staple didn't go all the way through once. Even when it was just a single layer of paper, for some reason a staple never came out. We were very disappointed.

Now for the staple remover. It works as you would imagine... it removes staples. Not sure what else we can say about this without anything remarkable to point out. It doesn't leave much shredding, I guess...?



The plastic quality is the same, and the metal is, too, cut sharper, so be careful with that if you're going to buy it. In short, it's a staple remover that does its job.


The hole puncher was the last of the tools that was remarkably tiny, since the pencil sharpener is not that unusual of a size. It looks similar to the stapler, but it works much better! In fact, we would say that it works the best out of all of the school supplies.


It punches clean, clear, and complete holes in one sheet of paper, but there were complications when we tried folding over part of the paper so it could go through two layers. Though since the stapler was so bad, we decided to give the hole puncher some leeway.


Finally, we came to the last item in our set. It was the pencil sharpener, made of the same blue plastic as everything else, but with a white plastic and metal blade on the inside to sharpen a wooden pencil. Anna found one easily, and tested it out.


Okay, so the hole puncher may have been bested. Maybe it's because the sharpener is not as mini to fit regular pencils, but it does sharpen them to a tee! We were quite pleased.


These were our snowflakes, cut using the mini scissors out of off-brand Post-It notes. Even with the few items that didn't work in this review, overall it wasn't too bad, and very cute and tiny for those who like cute and tiny things. Plus, after doing some research on Yoobi, we found about their motto, "One for me, one for you." That means that when you buy one of their products, the company sends one of the same thing to a less fortunate student somewhere in the United States. And for that, it made up for a bad score on the non-working supplies. Anna and I gave the Yoobi Mini Supply Kit an average score of 5/10 snowflakes. So what do you think? Will you buy this or skip out? It's alright with us either way, Anna and I just had fun reviewing these today, and maybe you can look forward to us doing more mini reviews in the future.


Hurrying to clean up She's school supplies,
Princess Anna and Queen Elsa

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