PencilWraps, Pens, Pencils, Notebooks, and some day-to-day happenings and such as...
Taking the rest of the year off from blogging due to too many things happening at once ( Christmas/Birthdays/Business Moving/editing deadlines/etc…..) BUT, I had to post my pics of RAH’s Spain kit that I received recently. Enjoy, and don’t miss getting one before they’re sold out! This is the last kit of the first year!
Click to embiggenate.
Happy 1st Anniversary to a pencil that truly stands out.
Took a trip to Michael’s over the weekend. We had a birthday present to buy for one of my son’s friends and had been told by his mom that he wanted some robot craft thing. Don’t see it in the picture do you. Yeah, this is a picture of everything else that we purchased besides the birthday gift!
Included are:
Both sketchbooks and the pencils are for my son. I’m pretty sure that if it went his way, the entire rainforest would be green lit to be made into sketchpads and pencils. Not kidding. I have a 2 inch stack of paper next to my desk right now of his drawings that took him 4 days. The Windpower™ Sketchbook has 70 sheets and the smaller sketchpad has 100. We got the smaller one for on-the-go to keep in the car, but I’m sure the larger one will be full by the end of the week. It’s great that he prefers drawing and coloring to TV though. He’s only 3 but he’ll sit there for hours. Love it.
The Michael’s journals were in the $1 bin and were picked up on the way out. They were $1.50 though. I will be reviewing those shortly. Based on what I’ve seen of them so far, I’ll probably be giving some away. Stay tuned.
I didn’t know that I had such “expensive” taste in mechanical pencils. I had Niji 500 mechanical pencils when I was in 5th grade. They were my favorite just because of how cool the entire tip retracted into the barrel. I mean, they wrote fine and all, but the unique design and mechanism is what got me. I tracked down a couple of these several months ago. They weren’t the same as the ones in this ebay posting but the design was similar. Mine say OHTO on the barrel and or clip and these say Yasumoto on the clip. The Yasumoto are exactly the ones that I had all those years ago, although mine did have the word “Niji” in white on the barrel as well, I think.
I have a saved search for them on my eBay account so I get notified if they ever pop up. When I first saw them on here, they were selling for 99 cents. I checked back later and BAM!!! A little out of my “collecting mechanical pencils” budget. Oh, well, maybe next time. I’ll just have to keep looking.
This month’s RAH dish comes from Panama! Whenever you say Panama, this song is the first thing that pops into my mind. Sorry. Growing up in the 80s and playing guitar, there is no way that it could be any other way. The notebook with the Spanish Conquistador Balboa on the cover looks awesome. And, instead of just getting the notebook, you get a notebook jacket! Also, because conquistadors need their metal, you get a shiny eraser shield too!
Read The Low Down on Sam and Hen’s Panama trip and order yourself up some zebra print….wait, no… just get some Panamanian goodies at RAH.
Why do I feel like having coffee and donuts?
Rad and Hungry is rolling out their March stationery kit and as you can plainly see from the title of this post, it’s from Korea. Get one here or treat yourself to a year’s subscription to make sure you get one every month from the upcoming countries!
In case you don’t know what Rad and Hungry is all about, read the blurb below and then click here for the rest of it:
The Something Mighty Collection by RAD AND HUNGRY is a monthly series of travel-inspired, locally sourced, stylie goods for those who love office supplies as much as creators Sam Alston and Hen Chung.
( Here is my Rad and Hungry haul from Mexico! )
My son came into my room and was eying the pens and pencils in my pencil wrap. My Dixon Ticonderoga pencil was just sitting on top. He asked if he could have it to draw with. Mind you, he had one of his 120 colored pencils in his hand at the time but he insisted that he needed my pencil. I told him that he could and he grabbed it and went to his table to color. I heard Angela telling him something but I didn’t know what. He looked a little confused when he came to tell me that the pencil was broken. I thought that he had pressed down too hard on the tip and broke the lead. When I looked at it, the lead was not broken but it did look like he had been using it to color as one side of the lead was blunt. It seems that after coloring with it for a while, he kept pushing the eraser but no new lead would come out. Angela had been trying to explain to him that it was similar to his colored pencils that needed to be sharpened after use. He was adamant about the fact that the pencil was broken. I quickly understood what the problem was and, since I wanted my pencil back anyway, I told him he could have the other, bigger pencil that I had in my wrap instead. He agreed to the trade and went off to keep coloring.
Here’s what he’s thinking. In my post about the Goodie bags, I took pics of the Zebra mechanical pencils that I put in every bag. Well, my son liked them a lot and took some while I was packing them in the bags. He quickly figured out how they worked and kept clicking them, pushing out the lead, and causing it to break. Those needed to be taken away after a while because we can’t have my 9-month-old daughter eating pieces of lead while she crawls around. When he saw the Dixon on my desk, he confused it for one of the mechanical pencils. The pic below can further illustrate why he might have made that mistake. Remember, he just turned 3 and the color of the pencil itself doesn’t matter because he mostly uses colored pencils.
The Zebras were made to look similar to small wood pencils (the yellow and black look even more like wood pencils) and the pencils he has used on a regular basis are these. He didn’t use his first wood pencil too much after he bit the eraser off and was using it like a bat. But that was 4 or 5 months ago. SO much has happened since then. 
Two things learned:
We took my son to the doctor’s yesterday. After the checkup the doctor offered him something from the toy drawer. There were a number of kid trinkets in there along with a bunch of pencils. Guess what my son chose?
Click on any image to enlarge.
I received my STMT X Mexico bundle from Rad and Hungry! Totally awesome. They go all out and customize the packaging for every kit based on the country from which it originates. Attached to the twine were cutouts from a Loteria game (bingo-type Mexican game) I played as a kid. I haven’t seen those in like 20+ years.
I got all four colors available for this month’s kit. (Thanks Hen! We’ll get that pencil wrap out to you as soon as possible) Along with that came 2 pencils per kit and one pack of large labels per kit. (SEE UPDATE BELOW)
Didn't notice the shadow on the tips until I uploaded.
The two pencils that you get in the kit (you get a brown and a yellow one) are Berol Mirado 2 Medianos made in Mexico as well. Chris at Pens’n'Paper has a review on those. I did sharpen one here at work and it writes a lot stiffer than my smooth Ticonderoga. And, even though it’s a Number 2, it’s not as dark. Maybe the 2 Mediano (medium) means that it is supposed to be a little lighter – like a medium 2HB. I don’t know.
The Scribe notebooks have 100 sheets of 56 gsm paper. It feels soft just like I remember it. They’re only 8.25″ x 6″ (21cm x 15.5cm) and they are also made in Mexico, apparently by a division of Kimberly-Clark.
The labels are cool too. They are bright white, come in a resealable bag, and are all connected. You get a massive sheet that looks like it belongs on a tractor-feed printer. They should last you a while.
One of the things that I noticed about the RAH kits is that each has a custom “TSA Screening” card so that you can try out your goods. In this kit from Mexico TSA stands for “Tasty Sauce Aplenty”. In the previous kits, France and Columbia, it has stood for “That’s Some Attitude” and “Tasting Some Awesomeness” respectively. (I wonder what next month will be and how long they can keep that up) The paper that it’s printed on is actually Mohawk Superfine 80lb (118gsm) Ultrawhite smooth.
My favorite part is of course the notebooks because they bring back memories of my childhood. You know, for as long as I have had this addiction, I can’t believe I only started this blog last year. More detailed notebook review to follow.
Get yourself one or subscribe so that you get the upcoming countries here.
UPDATE: I incorrectly stated that the Mexico kits shipped with large or medium labels and that they shipped two per kit. Apparently I can’t count even while looking at my own pictures. That was incorrect as they only send one pack of labels per kit and in one size, large. I humbly apologize for the incorrect info posted earlier.
Pic taken with my phone. I'll take a better one for the Rotring review.
Got my latest order from JetPens!
From left to right:
In getting with “the organizing”, Angela wanted to have several different colors for our calendar to designate certain items in our schedules. We had all of the Hi-Tec-Cs in 0.3mm but they weren’t showing up very well on the glossy calendar so we upped the tip size.
So far I love the weight of the Rotring 600. It writes smoothly, it’s black, it’s heavy, and it’s metal! When I ordered mine there were 2 left in stock. No shock that they are out of stock now, but they still have the silver body!