While pruning Russian olives, I admired the red bark and thought they'd make nice pencils. So I ordered long leads from the Faber-Castell website and got some long, fine drills (1.4 mm, 1.6 mm, 2.0 mm). The heartwood is soft and the drill follows it.
Rambling around our place, I clipped twigs from several species: serviceberry, lilac, redosier dogwood, willow. Once they season, I'll make a batch of pencils for holiday gifts.
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