Discovery

The Palomino Blackwing Pearl — now, with an exclusive preview!

/ Andy Welfle / 2 Comments

It’s been a very Palomino-focused spring around here at Woodclinched. I hope that soon I’ll have some more Yikes! stuff to show you, but in the meantime, there’s some news out of California Cedar Products that I can’t resist sharing.

Pencils.com and Palomino (I’ve never sure which brand is now the authoritative Blackwing spokes-entity) just announced this week the creation of the Palomino Blackwing Pearl, the third pencil in the Palomino Blackwing lineup.

It sounds like the performance is just right in the middle of the two existing Palomino Blackwings:

The Blackwing Pearl features a lustrous pearl white finish and black eraser, along with a balanced and smooth graphite core that is softer than the graphite found in the Palomino Blackwing 602, but firmer than the graphite found in the Palomino Blackwing.

I spoke with Pencils.com president Charles Berolzheimer, “WoodChuck“, last week about the new pencil. The phrase they’re using to describe it is “balanced and smooth.” I asked if they’re going to put that as the motto on the barrel, and he said no. Charles did, however,  tell me a little bit about the style of the new Pearl.

“It’s going to be pearly white, almost a pinkish, translucent hue,” Charles told me. “We talked a lot about introducing another eraser for it, but we’re going to stick with the black eraser. We’ll still have a series of replacement erasers so people can hack their pencil.”

Admittedly, I imagine a pink eraser would look really good with this pencil, but honestly, the black eraser on the white pencil with that gold ferrule? That’ll look really lovely.

The Blackwing Pearls will be released to the public on May 2, and will apparently be available both on Pencils.com and in retail stores, where the product line has really been become more and more prevalent. No word yet on their price, but I’m assuming they won’t cost more than their counterparts ($19.95 for a dozen, or $163.98 for a gross).

I am proud to announce, however, that Woodclinched has discovered some top secret images of the new pencil. Prepare yourself for the exclusive world premiere of this highly-anticipated pencil:

A fabulous Photoshop mockup of the new Palomino Blackwing Pearl

Just kidding. This is the product of my terrible, terrible Photoshop “skills”. I used to have a vector of the Palomino Blackwing logo, which I can’t seen to locate, so as you can see, I expertly re-created it.

I will, however, attempt to talk my way into a advance sample, so I can give it a good try, all in the service of my Dear Readers. And hopefully, the real-life thing will look much better than this abomination, above. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, check out the full press release here. And after May 2, check out Pencils.com to buy it!

Number 2 pencil-themed sunglasses from Warby Parker

/ Andy Welfle / 1 Comment

One of my favorite brands to emerge out of the last several years is the eyeglasses maker Warby Parker. With a series of vintage-style plastic frames, they sell them for a great price ($95, lenses and frames included!), and they donate a pair to charity. I currently wear the Japhy frame, and I love it. (I almost applied for a job there last year, and went so far as to write a fake blog post about pince-nez glasses, part of the application process. It was pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.)

Warby Parker donates a portion of this purchase to Pencils of PromiseToday in my email, I got an announcement from Warby Parker that they’re releasing a couple limited-edition sunglass frames, the purchase of which gives some amount of money to Pencils of Promise, a fun, pencil-themed charity providing educational resources to at-risk students.

What’s cool about these sunglasses is that not only are the big, midcentury-stylish frames Warby Parker does well, but they are themed like a typical Number 2 yellow wooden pencil, too!

The Aldous and the Everett, two pencil-themed frames

The Aldous and the Everett, two pencil-themed frames from Warby Parker. Click to visit the product page.

So there you have it! Pencil themed sunglasses! I checked it out to see if I could order a pair, but I saw that it was “non-prescription only”.

I tweeted the company, which is pretty responsive on Twitter:

They responded with a video! How cool is this?

Thanks for the video, Carlo! Trouble is, I might drive into a tree or miss my exit without my prescription. And I discovered not too long ago that I am incapable of touching my finger to my eye, and therefore cannot wear contacts.

In the meantime, other pencil lovers — show your charitable side and buy some pencil frames!

New Kickstarter Project: “Sprout: a pencil with a seed”

/ Andy Welfle / 4 Comments

This is a fun project: it’s a premium cedar pencil, that has a seed embedded in a water-activated capsule in the top. When it gets too short to use, stick it in some dirt, water it, and watch the seed grow! Here’s their Kickstarter project (check it out for a really awesome video):

Sprout: a pencil with a seed. | Kickstarter.com

It comes in several different varieties: from flowers to vegetables, jalapeño, marigold, parsley, basil, cherry tomato, and lots more.

Can you imagine how fun this would be in a classroom? Each kid gets a different variety, and after they wear their pencils down, the teacher plants them in a big window garden, and by the end of school — vegetables!

Sprout: seed pencils. Stick the end in dirt, and watch your plant grow!

Stick your Sprout pencil in the dirt, water it, and make the plant grow!

It seems like these guys aren’t just putting seed in any old pencil, either. The description of their project makes it sound like they put a lot of thought into the quality of their pencil:

We really like writing with wooden pencils.  They have a tactile feel that even the best mechanical pencils can’t match.  Getting up to sharpen them forces us to take a break and look around, a great way to reconnect during a long problem set.  We designed Sprout around a high quality Ticonderoga cedar pencil body.  It’s a great writing experience.  And it smells really nice too.

I couldn’t agree more. The creators are a group of MIT engineers who formed a company, Democratech, who conceived and produced this whole thing!

The only possible flaw I could see in this pencil is the very thing that makes it unique: the water-activated capsule at the top. As the FAQ says:

What happens if I accidentally wet my Sprout?

If you spill something on your Sprout the tip will begin to dissolve, getting the seed ready for germination.  Unfortunately Sprout doesn’t know the difference between accidental and intentional watering, so if you accidentally wet your Sprout it’s time for planting.  We’ve worked hard to make a resilient seed capsule but it’s a tradeoff between resistance to accidental spills and plantability.

Not being an engineer, from MIT or anywhere else, I can’t think of a way around this, unless it comes with a plastic cap or something to keep the water out (and would defeat the purpose of being eco-friendly).

I maxed out my Kickstarter budget for the year, so I can’t get in on this. But you should! This is my favorite donor level, for $100:

Bacon Bliss Pack. We wish we could grow Bacon at home, in our office, or in our classroom. Unfortunately we can’t, but it doesn’t mean we can’t pretend! We’ll send you 10 Heirloom Basil Sprouts printed as though they contained Bacon. And we’ll laser etch your logo or up to 50 characters of your choosing onto all the Sprouts in this pack. Free domestic shipping.

Sprout: a pencil with a seed. | Kickstarter.com
Democratech.us | Democratech’s website

A Blackwing movie?

/ Andy Welfle / 1 Comment

I was looking through all the blogs I usually read each afternoon, and on the Pencils.com blog, Studio 602, I saw an interview, posted seemingly offhandedly, with the filmmakers working on a movie called, simply, “Blackwing”.

This doesn’t actually play the movie file — it’s a screenshot of the trailer. Click the image to jump to the filmmaker’s trailer page.

I watched the trailer, blinked, and was all, “wait, what?” — did someone actually make a film about the Blackwing?

Well, it seems, yes. And at least according to the Pencils.com Twitter feed, it was fairly surprising to them, too:

According to the interview, It sounds like the filmmakers, Outside In Studio, had everything scripted and ready to go with their movie concept — except for the key writing utensil.

According to the filmmakers’ interview with Pencils.com:

We had already completed a few drafts of the script and were already entering pre-production. When we were searching for props for Milo’s room, we were looking for items that were ultra-artistic and out of the ordinary, that really spoke about the character and how deep his obsession was.  It wasn’t until we stumbled upon pencils.com and saw the Blackwing on the homepage that we realized the importance between the artist and their tool.  The Blackwing was everything we didn’t know we were missing.  We were first attracted to its appearance – it was simple but had this demure quality, it was the perfect balance between power and subtlety.

From what I gather from the trailer, the plot is sort of a dark version of “Harold’s Purple Crayon” — a misfit child, Milo, finds power in a magic pencil that turns to life what it draws. It seems, as though, he doesn’t fully understand its consequences.

While the film trailer and the interview doesn’t mention which Blackwing it is — an original Eberhard Faber Blackwing or a new Palomino Blackwing — it is clear that the first Palomino Blackwing is used, though in its brief cheesecake shot, only the word “Blackwing” remained. It reflects the beauty of the gold/matte black finish of the actual product, but only the mystical, mythical name: Blackwing.

Although I am more of a fan of the shark-blue-grey found on the barrel of the original Blackwing and the Palomino Blackwing 602, I can understand why they used the matte black. As they pointed out, it is elegant and dark. It looks more like a magic pencil than a pencil you might take with you to jot down notes at, say, a client meeting.

Like many independent films, the filmmakers are going to make their rounds at the film festivals and hope to open in summer 2013, which means it could be another year or so after that before I can see it anywhere close to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I live.

Head on over to Outside In’s site to see the trailer, and over to Studio 602 to read the full interview. It is quite interesting.