Some smells associated with school are best left out of a fine fragrance – overcooked cabbage, damp mops and sawdust covering various effluvia sping to mind; but these fragranced products and personal scents are cleverly composed to provide a highly refined – and sometimes welcomingly whimsical – time-travel trip for your nose… Sharpening by knife is swift, but demands a certain finesse. Too harsh and you can break your newly revealed point; too soft and you will spend all day to get one sharpened pencil.

Similar in looks and size to a mechanical pencil sharpener, electric pencil sharpeners are a faster alternative for graphite and colouring pencils; insert the end of the pencil into the machine, and the job is done for you.

The procedure of using a manual sharpener is easy. All you need to do is hold the sharpener in one hand and then with the pencil in the other hand, place the point into the hole. You then rotate the pencil, which should produce flaky pencil coils and bits of graphite that come out of the sharpener. Some are hard pencils to sharpen, while others are softer, so you cannot use the same sharpening method on all of them. Chisel point: When using the knife to cut the tip into a chisel shape, allowing two types of lines.

A craft knife is a great example of how to sharpen a pencil without a sharpener and is, therefore, the preferred method of many a tradesperson and adventurer, too. The only major problem with these types of sharpeners is replacing the blades, which can be difficult. If you decide to use a craft knife to sharpen your pencils hold them in your non writing hand and at a shallow angle stroke the blade along the wood away from you (for safety get a Derwent sharpening stand). To start with you are shaving the wood away from the inner strip and then once it is exposed you can sharpen little bits off of the strip until it is to the point you want. This technique requires a little practice so try it on a more disposable pencil before trying it on your best pencils.If you happen to find yourself in an inhospitable jungle of the urban variety, I’m sure this technique would work equally well on pavement or tarmac. What It Produces Any decent and sharp blade is suitable for knife sharpening a pencil. Even here in the UK with our much stricter knife laws, I can carry a diminutive Spyderco Bug and sharpen pencils to my heart’s content. The Handheld Sharpener A novel take on the traditional reed diffuser, here Hindmarch uses ceramic pencils to draw up the scent and diffuse it into the room. The Pencil Shavings’ scent is satisfyingly dry and woody, with the cedar punctuated by mandarin, pink pepper, rose, cypress and a surrealistically realistic accord of ‘novelty erasers and fresh notebooks.’ Adding quirkiness and humour to a WFH (Working From Home) desk, the expression definitely matches my own on many a day. These blades can get blunt, so they should be replaced when this happens. This should be easy to do by removing the screws that hold the blades down. Some of the sharpeners have a single hole for the pencil, but a double hole is a better option. This provides a hole for smaller pencils and larger pencils. The manual sharpener is okay for everyday writing and drawing, as it is cheap, safe to use, and portable. However, if you are not careful, you can land up with an irregular pencil point, and it might not make the grade for seasoned artists who are looking for something better.