 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allnock and I'm going to share a few things from my birthday, including some vintage art supplies, some cards and ATC some of you sent, as well as things from Mom. And this is a package that Mom sent weeks and weeks before my birthday. We did not know I would be making an emergency trip to go home and see her as she was very, very ill. She is in hospice right now, as I'm recording this. But she sent me an apron from the Della Plain Art Center in her town, where she used to take classes. She used to exhibit some of her art, that sort of thing. So that was a treasured gift from Mom. And while I was at home, she also gave me some other things that I'm going to show you in this video. So this, this apron is not a vintage art supply, but it does say it has stain release technology on it. So I will be testing that over time. And if I get reports back, I will share them here on whether or not stains come out of this. Let's take a look at some other things I got from Mom and from you. One of my big tasks while I was visiting Mom was to pack up her old apartment to move it into the new apartment, all of her stuff. And one of my sisters and I just went in and just pulled everything together. We got all the small stuff into boxes because they were just moving her down the hallway to the hospice area. And one of the things Mom said she wanted me to look for and pull out was all of her pastel pencils. And I was just kind of going through all the art supplies, trying to sort out things that she might still use if she gets back to feeling well enough to make anything versus things that just didn't need to be used at all versus the stuff she was giving to me, which was the pastels. She has given me her entire collection from like decades ago, her entire collection of soft pastels. She just had these giant, giant trays full of them. But she had kept the pastel pencils. And she always thought she'd maybe get back into it. She's done more acrylic in the last number of years in an art group they have at her building. But she still had these. This was like one of those signs of hope for her. I think that she would eventually get back to making more of her own art instead of just in that art group. But I sorted through the pencils. I was trying to figure out what brands were here, what kind of color collections I have here. These were all ones that she had bought years ago. Now, they're not vintage brands necessarily. Stabilo still makes theirs. You can buy them online. I'll put links to all of these down below in the supply list. But each one is just a little bit different. And one of the things I discovered, especially with these Conte pastels, they have a stripe. You see the white stripe and then there's some that have a gold stripe. The ones that Conte makes now, they have no stripe on them. So different companies change their pencil style over time. And so I know that these are decades old. She hasn't bought new art supplies like these in a really long time. So they've been around forever. One of the reasons she gave them to me, she said, was because she she can't figure out how to sharpen them. Because she's got arthritis in her hands. She's not going to use a knife on them. She couldn't find a pencil sharpener that wouldn't break the tips. And you may have had that with either pastel pencils or even with colored pencils. And that can be a challenge. Now the old school traditional way of sharpening any kind of pencil long before there were pencil sharpeners was to use a knife. And the way I think about it in my brain to explain it is that consider the pencil to be like a carrot. You're trying to make a point out of it. So you're shaving at an angle, slices of the wood off and you're trying not to slice off the pigment because you want to use the pigment, but you have to slice off some of it of course in order to get a sharp tip on your pencil. Now when you're using a knife, you want a super sharp knife. Don't use something that's dull or it's just not going to work. And just work your way carefully around it. If you like a long point, then you just need to shave off more of the wood and make it a slow long taper. And I find that especially with pastel pencils, if they have a short point, they need to be sharpened quite often because that that soft pastel at the tip just wears down really quickly. So this is in real time to show you how long it can take to sharpen a pencil like this. Once I get down to only the pastel sticking out, then I use the knife and start to try to carve that tip and just using a very light pressure scraping it along the tip of it, then I can make a point that is practically like a pencil sharpener point. This is a long process. As you can see, it takes a while, but that is the old school way of doing it. And you can get a nice sharp point on your pencil. Now, if you are looking for something that's sharper than this, then you can use a pencil sharpener. I found this one from generals. They say the big they at generals says this will sharpen anything. I do find that it sharpens anything that isn't a super fat pencil because these Contes are extra thick. So if you're using pencils that are really thick, it's just harder work. I actually got a blister trying to use this sharpener with these Conte pencils because it was just a lot of work to twist it. So my right hand, I have two blisters, one of my thumb and one of my middle finger, where I guess I was extra gripping the pencils. And it did take a while to just kind of keep putting it back in there and sharpen it, but I did get a decent sharp point. You can see the difference between the two. I can do the same thing with a knife that I can with a sharpener, but that's all up to you and how much time you want to spend sharpening any of your pencils. And this goes the same for regular colored pencils, graphite pencils and these these kind of pastel pencils. I did just try to get them all sharpened because I wanted a full set that at least had tips that I could begin with because most of them were just so dull. And fair warning, there is no art in this video made with these pencils, but I will be creating some soon. One of the things my mom said, which I thought, you know, I want to take her advice, but also like it's not advice I expected. When we were talking about my artwork, she said, oh, you're just so talented. You could do so many things. She said, but you shouldn't do so many landscapes. You really should do people and animals. I really like your portraits and your animals. And I was like my portraits, I don't feel like I do very good portraits. Now, I can sometimes make a person look recognizable if it's, you know, someone that you know or someone that's famous. I can kind of give a hint at making them recognizable, but not always really easily. But you know, I might do some of that in the future because that's what mom thinks I should do. So I want to honor her in that. So I might go through the pain of trying some portraits, but I will do more animals because I do love doing animals. Now here's again, where I was trying to work with the knife to sharpen and sometimes, depending on how the tip broke off in the last sharpening or the last usage, you may end up with a big old chunky tip to it. And it's just really hard to get it down to a very sharp point. However, what I found is rather than always trying to insist on a super sharp point, if I'm just putting down some color in an area that I can afford not to have it super sharp, then I don't worry about doing it really, really sharp until I need it. So I will leave not in this particular case because I'm trying to sharpen everything, but a lot of times I will leave my pencils dull like this. Now in this particular case, I was putting texture onto this tangerine and I didn't need a super sharp point to do it. So why bother using up all of that extra pigment to try to make it super sharp if you don't need it super sharp? So generally I don't go for that last little tiny, I want to make it perfectly sharp until it's actually needed because I don't want to waste any of that beautiful pigment. So some of my pencils will kind of hang out and not be as sharp, but at least for this video for the first sharpening in the preparation of all these pencils, I did try to make them as good as I could, but you can see that one's not quite as sharp as maybe some of the others and that's okay. So one of the other things you can do to make a little bit extra sharpness, like on this one, you can use either sandpaper or a stump sander or just a nail file. A bunch of nail files super cheap online and was able to just use them. I mean all that pigment is now sitting on my nail file and yes, my pencil tip is nice and sharp, but look at all that pigment I lost. That step is better done when you're actually working on the piece because then you can, if you are doing a background or a larger area, you can tap off some of that extra color onto your paper and yes you can do that with colored pencil too. Now the Derwent pencils were extremely difficult to sharpen. They were constantly breaking on me. Now I don't know if that's a Derwent thing, I've had other Derwent pencils that were fine, but I did find that I had a lot of them that just the pastel inside them would break off and the tips would just be really difficult to get into any kind of a nice sharp point and it's very possible that these are just really old. With any pencil whether it's pastel pencils or color pencils, if you end up dropping them or someone else in history dropped them, it could be the manufacturer that there was an issue with a batch of pigment. It could be they dropped a pencil or the shipper dropped the box and one of the pencils in the box got jammed or the whole set. I mean there are people who blame a company for having bad pencils, some of them may. I'm not going to blame Derwent for the difficulty I had in sharpening because I know these are decades old. My mom has not bought art supplies like this in a long time, so I'm not going to hold them responsible for my lack of being able to sharpen the pencils here. I was trying to get off that little dark spot. I don't know if it was wood or pigment and busted it, so I had to start a louver sharpening that one. Yay! Anyway, I finally did get done. Everything is sharp and ready to go. I think my next video might be an animal because that's what mom wanted. I'm not going to risk trying to draw a person. Maybe I will. We'll see. You can find out on Saturday when you see my next videos. Subscribe so you can find out what I was bold enough to do. Now, there's also some things that I got in my mailbox from some of you and I had talked with people on ArtVenture about sending me ATCs. This is not an ATC. It's bigger than that. Beautiful collage though. Then there are some people that are not in Art Venture or maybe are and sent cards anyway. So some sent Easter cards, some sent birthday, some sent Easter birthday, which I kind of have in common with my mom that my birthday usually falls around Easter. Hers is on Christmas day and when I was growing up and even to this day I was always very conscious to try to make mom a non-Christmasy birthday card and just trying to make something that did not have to split the holiday for her so she could have special cards. So she has double cards from me every December. Here's an idea if you're sending cards to someone who makes and sends a lot of cards you could put it on a sticky note so they could reuse it. I'm going to just put that in my shelf, my stash on the wall that I keep for inspiration because it's cute. And then there were ATC cards so some of them came in. I didn't get very many of them but I keep mine in a treasure box. I put them all in these kind of sleeves and then I have a little treasure box for mine. Maybe eventually it'll fill up and I have to overflow to something else, get a bigger box. This card has a little insert in it that says, Chair is your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Lovely advice anytime in your life. This next card has a pocket that the person made for an inserted ATC. So interesting way to send an ATC to somebody and then it's not just kind of floating around in the envelope getting crushed by the post office. This one is just a card front doesn't open as you see and you can write the message on the back instead of having a folded card base. Keep things a little flatter for mailing and make it postcard-esque. Here's a card that had a very sweet note in it from a hospital chaplain who has grief groups and has offered to talk if I need to and I just want to say thank you to her and to everybody who replied to my newsletters in the last couple weeks as I was talking about what I'm processing with my mom and sharing your stories and hearing mine. It really made a huge difference. I just can't reply to everybody. It was just hundreds of emails and I'm just blessed to have a community like this so thank you all for that. It means a whole lot when you're going through something to know that everybody else goes through it too. It's just my turn and uh yeah I will get through it. I got one note from somebody who said she doesn't make cards but she watches videos and takes my classes and she said if she ever makes a card she will send me her first one so I'm looking forward to getting a card from her someday and then there's an amazon gift card in one cute little cupcake package and then here we've got a couple of ATC's hand drawn by the artist. She's one of our art venture people as well. You can join art venture anytime. There's a link in the doobly-do and it's free to join and this is from Magdalena in Poland. She's again an art venture person and she sent me just a package of envelopes. I'm going to have so much fun filling these with cards for my patrons. That's going to be a blast to make yellow cards with yellow envelopes. Now I did do a little bit of artwork. I didn't film it but I did some artwork when I got back. This is a painting my mom advised me on. I pulled up a photo from the class that I'm taking over at Sam Erp's art school and she wanted me to pull that big tree up front warm up the colors in the grasses and on the hillside and put more light on the top of the trees and add some reflections. There were a little bit of reflections but I amped those up in the water and made the water more blue. So thanks for the advice mom in getting my homework done. So thank you to all of you for staying through this video. I hope you learned something about sharpening your pencils or not dropping them. And I will see you again in a couple of days with maybe some artwork in these pencils if you guys would like to see that. If nobody wants to see it I'll do something else. Leave me a comment down below and I'll talk to you later. Thanks. Bye-bye.