… or why it’ll feel a bit like Christmas when we’ll do move-in on Wednesday next week.

So, you make something awesome and big, and then you need to get it somewhere else on the planet so others can enjoy it as well. In this case, this:

I knew I was going to have to ship it eventually, so I choose a cardboard construction that can be flat-packed like IKEA furniture. Still, the big vertical sheets are the full size, which is 50x70cm. So I needed a box with at least that base area. Which is honestly huge in comparison to most of the shipping boxes everyone stores in their basement. A friend pointed me at a shop that specializes in packaging, and I got the smallest box that fitted the requirement for base area:

It may not look that big in the picture, but it was always standing in the way in my kitchen for a while there. You can just see the cardboard pieces inside already. Here’s a better look:

Doesn’t look like much, lots of box space left, but the box couldn’t be any smaller because of the large size of some of the individual pieces. Time to fill up the box! Who needs packing peanuts when you have wool?

You can see the big bag of leftovers on the right, and the little box on the left holds the children’s loom. The rest of the supplies went on top, and I ended up with a pretty full box. It’s not particularly heavy (somewhere around 15kg, which is way below the weight limit for shipping), but it’s unwieldy and its dimensions are just within the size limits for a normal parcel. Here it is, all taped shut, in front of my apartment door:

The text on the sides is for the lovely people doing logistics for Dublin 2019, so they know where to deliver it for move-in. After successfully dropping it off at the post office and anxiously following the tracking number, the box is now safely in the convention’s off-site storage waiting for the day it’ll be unpacked and assembled.

I’m looking forward to showing you what’s inside real soon now!