Customer Reviews

Franciscan Desert Rose Recipe Box

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This recipe box is really nice, except I thought 4 by 6 recipe cards would fit in it, but they don't. They are just a little too big. Because I had already copied all of my recipes onto the 4 by 6 cards, I couldn't use this recipe box and had to look elsewhere. I kept the box though to use for other purposes because it matched my Desert Rose china.

Recipe cards come in two sizes 3x5 and 4x6. I was so excited to receive my recipe box, but when I opened it, I found it doesn't fit EITHER size or recipe card. I was so upset! The smaller 3x5 cards swim in it because the width of the box is far too wide for them. And the larger 4x6 cards are exactly 1/4 of an inch too wide to fit into the box. And as I was looking it over to see if I could make it work somehow, I noticed one of the little wooden caps that hide the screws was carelessly missing. The combination of those two problems made this box the biggest waste.

DON'T BUY IT.

I even went to the craft store to see if I could find some wood and screws to widen the box myself so it would fit, but I found it was actually cheaper just to buy another box from the craft store. I ended up getting a lovely wooden box from there and gave this awful imposter of a recipe box to my daughter to put hair clips in.

This recipe box is so fantastically hideous it's rather a marvel. I'm usually a fan of my desert rose accessories but this one ... wow. The thing is it could be so lovely and functional and yet it fails spectacularly. As mentioned before the size is so wrong. It's too thin, width wise, for the larger recipe cards but it's so darn deep that the smaller ones disappear as if down a hole. This wouldn't be horrible if it were wide enough, depth wise (front to back), to dig down and flip through the cards, but it's only about 2" that way, not nearly enough had it NOT been made too deep. So it's worthless for actually storing any recipe cards unless you enjoy dumping them out each time you want to look through them.

So it fails as a recipe box. But how about just a nice storage box? After all, we have more than recipes that need a pretty place to live. And this box could be it ... if they'd only made it pretty. Don't get me wrong, the wood is gorgeous, light but with a fantastic sheen and depth. That's fine. But those flowers on the front? You'd think they were painted on or at least stamped on in franciscan quality. Nope. Instead they look like they're printed onto the wood with early 70s quality printing. No, wait, that's an insult to early 70s printers. Just trust me, the flowers are HORRIBLE. They're semi-transparent (not good when the background's medium brown - muddy flowers), the colors overlap horribly, and the printing quality is something you'd see in the Sunday comics with large pixels. Seriously, going to your local craft store, picking up a recipe box and stickers, and doing it yourself in five minutes (heck, giving it to your toddler to do in five minutes) would yield an infinitely better box. It truly is that bad.