This Month's Craft Creative Box vs DIY Box: Hands-On With Both Subscription Boxes

Introduction

This Month’s Craft is a subscription box brand that has been heavily promoted on social media for months, promising a new creative adventure every month, from soap making and wood carving to macrame and pottery. The brand actually operates two distinct boxes under the same parent company: the purple Creative Box, focused on crafts like soap and candle making, and the green DIY Box, which leans toward wood carving and similar hands-on projects.

We purchased both to see whether the heavily advertised experience matches what actually arrives at your door.

First Impressions and Ordering Experience

Ordering was straightforward and delivery was fast. Payment is processed through PayPal, and both boxes landed in the mid-$35 range, which sits in reasonable territory for a monthly craft kit. It is worth knowing that both boxes belong to the same parent company, so if a website looks familiar, that is probably why. The marketing pages lean heavily on polished imagery, and some of the promotional visuals do appear to be AI generated, which is a fair point of skepticism before you buy.

Once the boxes arrived, though, the packaging experience was genuinely impressive. The first box for each subscription appears to be the same for everyone rather than that month’s themed craft, which makes sense as a showcase of what the service can do.

This Month’s Craft Creative Box: Soap Making

The Creative Box first-month theme is soap making, and it is one of the most complete craft kits we have unboxed. Inside you get a silicone mold, a clear soap base and a butter soap base, coffee grounds, rose buds, jasmine buds, a branded natural pigment set, food coloring powder, and aromatic oil blends in vanilla, milk, almond, and honey. Crucially, the kit also includes the small consumables most craft brands forget: paper cups, spoons, and liquid measuring guides. If you have allergies, note that ingredients like almond oil are in the mix.

The process is simple: cut the soap base into chunks, microwave it, work fast once melted, add pigment and scent, then pour into the mold. Results depend heavily on the clear base, which produced the best bars, while the butter base felt stickier to work with. Layered designs work well if you let each layer set before pouring the next.

A single package of base makes roughly one bar per stick, so plan your pours carefully. After a two-hour cure, the finished soaps ranged from genuinely giftable, like a layered ocean-themed bar with a water-ripple top, to a few experimental flops. As an introduction to a new hobby, this box does exactly what it promises: everything you need is included, the directions are clear, and it leaves you wanting to make more. A minor wish list item would be a little more soap base.

This Month’s Craft DIY Box: Wood Carving

The DIY Box is the greener, more rugged sibling, and its first-month theme is wood carving. Inside you get two carving tools, a small booklet with three projects (a bird, a gnome, and a spoon), three wood blocks, a leather strop with waxy compound, sandpaper, gloves, finger tape, glue, and beeswax. There is also a bonus booklet at the bottom of the box with three extra projects that look far more realistic than the main ones.

The instruction quality is uneven. The bird has both a short video tutorial and written instructions, the spoon has written instructions only, and the gnome has minimal written guidance with no video or detailed carving photos at all. The booklet does cover useful fundamentals: carving with the grain, blade sharpening and stropping, wetting the wood as you go, and safety.

In practice, wood carving is genuinely hard. The pine block supplied for the bird proved dense and unfriendly to carve, chipping in the wrong places even with correct technique, and an experienced woodworker who examined the piece agreed the specific block we received was either poor quality or an unlucky cut. The provided knives were judged decent but not exceptional. Sanding and a beeswax finish helped, but the final result fell far short of the booklet’s imagery, particularly the gnome, whose pictured level of detail looks unachievable with these tools and block sizes.

Which Box Should You Choose?

As a service, this brand does a lot right. Boxes ship quickly, are densely packed, and generally include everything you need, which is rarer than it should be in this category. At around $35, the Creative Box in particular feels like solid value, and even the DIY Box includes enough material that sourcing it all separately from a craft store would likely cost more.

The main caveat is the marketing. AI-generated imagery sets expectations that the real projects cannot match, especially the gnome project in the DIY Box, which has no video tutorial and a reference image that looks impossible to reproduce. The Creative Box avoids this problem better, with photography that resembles real results.

Our verdict: the Creative Box earns a strong recommendation as a first craft subscription, while the DIY Box is worth trying only if you already have some patience for whittling and can accept that your first carving will not look like the pictures.

Conclusion

This Month’s Craft delivers well-curated boxes that introduce you to a new hobby with genuinely complete supplies. The soap-making Creative Box is the standout, delivering a fun, low-friction first project with impressive attention to detail. The wood-carving DIY Box offers good value and multiple projects but is let down by weak guidance for its hardest project and marketing images that overpromise. If you want a reliable monthly dose of crafting joy, start with the Creative Box.