HB Hexagon Pencil Addict

Yay! Pencil addict found. It’s lovely to encounter a pencil addict online that shares the same love of hexagon pencils. Hooray! Hello fellow pencil addict!

Two days away from National Pencil Day (30th March 2019), one of our favourite national days in the year. We have found artist. Bashir Sultani, who makes cosmic galaxy art with salt on his YouTube channels, but has also been making animated gifs and forming words, shapes, and logos with sharpened yellow HB hexagon pencils on his instagram account.

Hexagon Pencil Animations

Hexagon Pencils Arrangement

Featured : Living Etc Magazine

Hooray! Our London Underground Pencils are featured in the March 2017 issue of Living Etc Magazine in an article about the latest news, updates about London. 

Absolutely giggled through the write up about our pencils, in the article titled "Write On" - Pencil snapping as an alternative therapy - definite food for thought.

Talking about food, this month's Living Etc also contains some super delish recipes from one of our favorite food stylist / chef in Australia, Donna Hay's quick pasta recipes. Definitely trying some of the recipes out this week, supermarket shopping planned. Yum!

It was a lovely to have great natural light at our "How're you feeling?" Pop Up Shop in Clerkenwell this week. Found some time in between running the shop to style the photo during our pop up, cutting some paper confetti from pastel sheets of coloured paper and overlapping the magazines. Bliss! ☺️✂️🎉📷

National Espresso Day

23rd November is National Espresso Day! Woohoo! As coffee fiends, think the body clock kinda fine tunes to national coffee days... this morning an extra coffee boost please!

So let's turbo charge our day with a double shot of espresso, for double happiness. Coffee Twinning eh? ☕️☕️👯‍♂️👯🙂🙃 Double Espresso = Coffee twins... yay! New formula.

Whether you spell Espresso with a "S"  or with a "X" Expresso, may we wish you an awesome caffeinated day and happily full of beans! 

Espresso pencils - part of Coffee Buzz Buzz pencil set

I AM A X Shop At The Museum at Le Bon Marché

Bonjour Paris! Together with Shop At The Museum we have created 3 brilliant set of pencils for their Paris pop up at Le Bon Marché.

The pencils are all in French including our favourite things about France - pâtisserie, joie de vivre and the Paris Métro.

1. Joie De Vivre Pencil Set

The joie de vivre pencil set have many of the french daily life we love. This includes:

• Bruncher

• Bouquiner

• Paresser

• Danser

• Chiner

• Embrasser

2. Pâtisserie Pencil Set

The pâtisserie pencil set have all our favourite French pastries. This includes:

• Tarte aux fraises

• Paris-Brest

• Mont-Blanc

• Madeleine

• Macaron

• Eclair

In the process of designing these pencils and shooting the below photo, we gobbled many macarons from our all time favourite Pierre Hermé. They always have the most innovative and cool flavours of macarons - jasmine tea, mandarin and olive oil, chocolate and earl grey tea are divine.

3. Paris Métro Pencil Set

Our favourite Métro stations in Paris. The thing about Paris Métro stations, every Métro station has a different decor or different theme. We love cruising along the Métro lines, as some stations are just like visiting a museum, a piece of art in its own right.

Like our London Underground Pencil Set, the Paris Métro pencils the colour of the lines and their interchange foiled onto HB pencils.

• Odeon

• Saint-germain des Près 

• Opera

• Bastille

• Invalides

• Louvre-Rivoli

These are all Limited Edition designs, and could only be purchased directly from Shop At The Museum at Le Bon Marche between now and Christmas. A great souvenir and gift from Paris!

As the famous saying goes from the movie Sabrina by Audrey Hepburn - Paris is always a good idea!

How to Make A Pimm's Cocktail

The last few days we have been very lucky in London with the temperature soaring - it may seem that F-I-N-A-L-L-Y, we have the first signs of some warmer weather. After an April month of cold rain drizzles, think it's about time the sun makes an appearance: Hello Sunshine! 👋☀️

With the blazing heat, and temperatures up to 26 degrees (apparently today being the hottest day in the UK to date for the year) , apart from ice creams to cool us down, think it's also time for the great British Pimm's cocktail. A refreshing summer cocktail perfect for any parties. 

Here's how to make a Pimm's cocktail. Our recipe is as follows:

Ingredients: (per single serving)

• 1 Part Pimm's Summer Cup
• Mint Leaves
• Few slices of Peeled Cucumber
• 3 Parts of Lemonade
• Few segments Orange
• Few slices of Strawberries

Method : 

• Cut a cucumber in half. Using a peeler, peel the cucumber into long lengthy stripes. (Alternatively, you may slice the cucumber into little rounds, depending on how you would like to decorate your cocktail glasses).
• Crush the mint in the cocktail glass.
• Add some ice. 
• Add 1 part of Pimm's.
• Add the orange segments, strawberries and cucumber slices.
• Top the drink with 3 parts of Lemonade, give it a good stir. Add a straw of your choice. We find the straws from Tiger , yup that stripey gold straw in the pictures is pretty cool. 👌

Cheers! Enjoy and Sip happily. 🍹 

Other Variations : 

• For a non alcoholic cocktail, you may swap out the Pimm's with a cold brew iced tea.
• For a lovely ice cold dessert, the above recipe can be turned into alcohol / non alcohol pops. Simply freezing the above in ice lollipop trays to make frozen ice lollies. Strain the fruit if you'd prefer a smooth ice lolly. 😋

If like us, you are a fan of this British cocktail, we have created some pencils which we have foiled both sides; one side with the Pimm's cocktail ingredients, and the other side to make the cocktail. Recipe by your hand at all times. The pencils are available at Anthropologie or in our online store (by clicking the link below).

Color Swatching - Rainbow - Unicorn moment

Apart from creating new designs for the brand, another portion of work we do is on bespoke projects for exhibition merchandise, bespoke merchandise, PR events etc.

Currently at the desk now swatching for a new theme. Not sure is it the recent change in weather, it's April after all, April showers I guess. Rainbow has been in the head. So yay! Why not swatch a rainbow shade for a new set of pencils for this apt unicorn moment?  🌦🌈🦄✏️

P.S. Simply love emojis - totally a picture is worth a thousand words.

National Pencil Day

Yay! It's the 30th March and... oh Hello Sweet Pea... it's National Pencil Day! OMG!  ✏️❤️

Pencils mean a lot to us as a lot of our creativity, sketches, ideas all started with them. Our sweet pea to not to forget. Dedicating to the humble pencil on #PencilDay.

Thanks to our Instagram friend @366cards for reminding us of this lovely day. She has made the loveliest card inspired by our Crisps pencils to celebrate this lovely pencil day! Pssst... Don't forget to check out @366cards on Instagram. It's so creative - a national day is celebrated each day of the year with something special that she has created in a form of a card. Just look at the picture below - isn't it totally ace bananas! 🖖🍌🎉 Simply - follow worthy!

Image courtesy of @366cards on Instagram - Pencil Card to celebrate National Pencil Day

New 3 Pack

We have been enjoying working on collaborations. One of our latest is with The Clever Badger. They are a super duper cute company, based in Kent that sells an array of very fun cards, stationery and gifts. In addition, they have a monthly subscription box of goodies called "Badger Box".

Back in May we started a conversation on working together on a customised item for their themed boxes. (Hooray!!! We are absolutely chuffed to bits.) The theme was Office Life - Working Nine to Five.

To suit budget and the purpose of the gift box, we worked on new packaging for a set of 3 pencils, as our standard size has so far been a pack size of 6.

We are so pleased to see how the new pack size turns out after a few rounds of testing with our peel and seal plastic bag manufacturer in Nottingham, which works at the speed of lightning in terms of turnaround - absolutely awesome manufacturer. A big thank you to them!

Last but not least, the printing of new paper pencil band wrappers to fit the new pack size. YAY! Et voila - we have a new pack size of 3 pencils. 

If you are interested to have your own set of 3 pencils, please contact us via our Contact Us page and we look forward to working together with you on your ideas.