This is a link to the history of pencil making in Cumbria on the museum website.
Note the reference to "Lakeland". My very first set of coloured pencils were Lakeland Pencils by the Cumberland Pencil Company - and I've still got them!
You can follow Derwent and the Pencil Museum on Facebook where they often have good information about pencils
- Derwent Pencils - https://www.facebook.com/welovepencils
- The Pencil Museum https://www.facebook.com/pencilmuseum
[PS For those wondering what's happened to Making A Mark - I'm sorting out 150+ websites prior to a major transfer to a new site and the edit button on the dashboard is turned off by the host at 1pm this afternoon. Just a bit busy right now!]
I have my first pencils and with their box, also.
ReplyDeleteThe box from my era seems to be a bit of a treasure - I don't think there are many of them about!
ReplyDeleteI also have a (tin)box of Lakeland pencils...... someone gave them to me as a present when I was at art college. The box is tiny 5 X 10 cm and there are 6 pencils in it. The front of the box says Lakeland Colour Pencils by Cumberland. I liked them so much (partly because they were so neat and so small) that I didn`t bring them in to college on the basis that they would vanish one way or another and they were eventually put away in a drawer. Which is why I still have them,unused, nicely sharpened and still in their tissue paper !
ReplyDeletePS......to date both myself and the Lakeland pencil box, I was at college in the 60s............which makes the box about 50 years old!
ReplyDeleteTank you for postning the video, so interesting! While on honeymoon in 1991 in an old and very rusty Ford Transit , we went to the Lake District. Totalt unplanned at first- but our friends had given us , as a wedding present a night at a luxury hotel there ( we were young and poor and parked our rusty old car in the darkest corner we could find, a long way from the Porshes! ;-) ) Well, apart from the fantastic landscape this unplanned visit to the Lake District gave us the opportunity to visit one of the most interesting little museums I have seen ( and I am a keen museum-goer). To see how pencils actually were and are made was fanastic! Remember that in those days there was no internet , so all information came through books and museums. I still remember the aha-moment when I saw that pencils are not made by drilling a hole through each stick of wood! ;-)
ReplyDeleteIt was sad to see, in the video, the old factory buildings so abandoned. I totally understand that the workers need a modern and safer environment to work in, but could not the old building , with what appears big windos, be converted to artist studios? In that area, with the sublime landscape, there is surely a lots of artists around?
Thanks again for posting such an interesting post!
By the way, when is Squidoo closing? Through your links I found other interesting posts there and want to print them before they dissappear- there was one about a german lady who made forest diaries in gouache that was so very interesting- apart from the deep well of knowledge you have given us with your posts! :-))
Sorry for my long ranting...
Not a long rant at all!
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely story of your honeymoon - and what a good idea about the use of the old factory as artist studios.
Squidoo has started to close. Editing was disabled yesterday and the transfer of the individual sites starts tomorrow and they should all be transferred to Hub Pages by the end of September. I'm expecting the website will close down in October.
The forest diaries in gouache are by Martin Stankewitz who's actually a man living near Maulbronn in Germany.
This is his book about sketching the woods in gouache http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/2604229-forest-diary
This is his website http://www.edition-handdruck.de
I'm not sure where Martin is taking his sites - and not everybody is transferring to HubPages.
Thank you so much for the link! How stupid of me to make the mistake about a german " lady"...;-) I do hope the transfer of your sites will work just fine. You are a treasure:-)!
ReplyDelete