Making Pencils

Kuba turned 7 on Sunday and it was fun getting ready for his birthday party this year.  He wanted a nature themed party - so we went to work figuring how to do that.  The boys chose pictures of animals from old discarded library books, and we set about sewing small paper books for everyone. We used brown paper bags from Trader Joe's because the paper felt so thick and sturdy. Then we cut up branches from our apple tree to make into wood pencils.   This was challenging because we had no idea what we were doing.  We had to crush up a gazillion real pencils to harvest out the lead and then drilled holes into the end of the branch pieces.  We glued in the lead and Anders whittled the tips down with his Crows Path knife to form a new pencil.  The pencils we made were surprisingly cool. Kuba loves writing and drawing, so we thought giving away books and pencils was a good idea and appropriate for first graders.  I have no idea how the other kids liked them, but I do know that both my boys have started filling their own notebooks using their cool new apple wood pencil.