What percentage of kids are right and what percentage are left handed?
Based on the distribution of pens in their class pack, Stabilo seems to work with the assumption that about eight out of 48 children (~17%) are left handed.
Statistics seem to indicate that the actual number of left handed people is lower, but exact numbers depend on which statistic you look at – and which country that statistic covers.
I wonder if the discrepancy in this class pack means that teachers using this pack usually have a few spare left handed pencils at the end of the year…
If you are based in North West England then Manchester’s first StationeryFest on 1st July 2023 might be of interest to you.
It’s in the Manchester Central Convention Complex (that’s just the new name for what most of us call the GMEX).
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a lot of information about the companies that will be there, but the website https://stationeryfest.co.uk shows that there will be over 40 stallholders as well as stationery related presentations.
Eagle-eyed Bleistift reader Tomasz Maped [1]I didn’t realise that Maped, the name of a French stationery company, is a surname. from Poland contacted me after he noticed a Lamy Safari in the first episode of the second season of Solar Opposites.
I must have missed that detail when I watched this episode so am especially thankful to Tomasz for pointing this out.
The screenshots in this blog post has been taken from Season 2 Episode 1 of Solar Opposites. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.
If they have been left unused for a while it is not uncommon for gel pens / gel refills to stop working properly.
Unfortunately, this means that the more pens you have in your rotation / are using at the same time, the more likely you are not using them enough. That’s just what happened to me.
Top to bottom: Schneider Gelion (in a Caran d’Ache 849), Zebra JSB (in a Holbein x Rotring 600 3 in 1), Stabilo pointVisco
In the case of my Holbein x Rotring multipen the Zebra refill was only two years old. The blue refill is perfectly fine. Being blue meant it got used regularly, but the red refill didn’t get used quite as much, so stopped working. I have replaced it now with a red Lamy refill. The new red colour is grey-ish as is common for ballpoint refills, but it shouldn’t dry out as fast as the vibrant red Zebra JSB refill.
The Gelion refill was older. I actually made a video at the time that shows how to use this refill in a Cara d’Ache 849 …but as the refill was idle for too long it also stopped working.
The final gel-like pen that stopped working recently was Stabilo’s pointVisco. It did survive very long though: I think I got my first pointVisco in 2008, but as I had a set of mixed colours, some of them just weren’t used as much, so stopped working.
There are some common tricks to try to revive gel pens and refills, e.g. putting them in hot water. I tried these trick, but was unsuccessful and have decided to say goodbye to these two refills and the pen.
