Plastic Free July or The Sustainability post

Plastic Free July or The Sustainability Post

We’re a bit over a week from the end of July, but it is never too late. And this month is Plastic Free July. So today let’s talk sustainability. At Inkpact. And in your life as a Scribe.

Writing campaigns for Inkpact and our love for stationary are some of the things we all have in common. Work wise, apart from the happiness and expectation our letters bring smiles to the receivers, we can probably resume the rest to the paper cards and envelopes, fountain pens, and a completely online platform that helps us access the jobs and invoices and even the communications between “office” and Scribe Tribe. But did you know 100% of our paper is made from sustainable forests (FSC) as are the envelopes?

At Inkpact we try to make sure our business is sustainable, and that involves daily choices and suppliers. By choosing FSC paper, instead of a perhaps cheaper normal paper, and having developed a platform that allows for jobs to be fulfilled without the need of extra physical paper or printing, even when it comes to invoicing, we are conscious of our choices towards this blue planet of ours.

When you go to inkpact.com, you will also notice we have a selection of corporate gifts, that can accompany our cards, if the clients are looking for an even more personal and delightful approach. With these, we also source suppliers that have, in their ethos and business, strong ethical and environmental ideals. There is actually a blog post about it, written by (then) Head of Corporate Gifting, so I’ll paraphrase some bits, but you can read it completely here.

As a taster here are 3 brands whose beautiful products feature in our corporate gifting range.

Up Circle

Up-Circle elevates leftover natural ingredients, bringing them back to life as beauty products your skin will love. And as well as being 100% natural, their skincare range is also 100% brilliant. All their products are sustainable, vegan, cruelty free + made in the UK.

Kitchen Provisions

Kitchen Provisions was established by Tom Saunders and Helen Symonds to combine equipment and techniques with ingredients and recipes. They have put together an edit of kitchen equipment from around the world that is useful, fun and versatile. Wanting to not clutter up people’s kitchen cupboards with equipment that won’t see daylight. All products are tried, tested and purchased with care. Their store is a treasure trove for food and drink fanatics so I highly recommend going to check them out.

 Garçon Wines

These award winning bottles are made in the UK from 100% post-consumer recycled PET and are 100% recyclable after. By using plastic already in circulation, we are removing plastic from our environment and adding no new plastic into the world they’re the greenest wine bottles available. They’re tough enough to withstand the rigours of the postal system yet light enough to keep down carbon emissions & delivery costs. Their flattened design means they fit easily through the letterbox – a hassle-free, environmentally friendly way to receive wine.

 

By being part of the Scribe Tribe, you are already working towards a better planet, especially if you consider that the more we elevate each other, the better the whole world becomes. And that includes writing letters to bring comfort/happiness/thoughtfulness to those who receive them.

But this month, I have just found out, is also Plastic Free July. Which can be that extra nudge you may be needing to start changing small habits and help make the world a better place.

I bet you know already that EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF PLASTIC ever produced is still around. Since 1907, nothing has disappeared (“The world’s first fully synthetic plastic was bakelite, invented in New York in 1907, by Leo Baekeland who coined the term ‘plastics‘.”, in Wikipedia). We average a production of 300 million tons of plastic produced every year, with around 150 million of those being single use plastic. 8 million tons end up in the ocean every year. The majority of the rest ends up in minefields where it stays, not decomposing at a rate sustainable for life. So it will be there, here, for hundreds and hundreds of years.

This means every pack of grapes we ever bought, every toothbrush we had to discard, every charger cable that stopped charging our phone, heck, every pen we’ve ever thrown away, still exists on the planet. Scary thought.

I’d like to challenge you to check your daily plastic use and see if you could reduce it even by 25%. Maybe we can carry our own coffee cup, instead of drinking from a plastic one. Or carry our tote bags inside our purses/backpacks/pockets, just in case we end up doing an impromptu shop somewhere. Or start shopping in plastic free shops, even. Not purchase fast fashion, synthetic clothing to discard the following season.

I’d also love to know what you already do to cut plastic from your life, so share your thought and let’s learn from each other!

For more info on Plastic Free July, you can head here: https://www.plasticfreejuly.org/

Tania, Community Manager

Remedial Handwriting, by Yvonne Hedges

JustWrite classroom a

Just Write - Remedial Handwriting, by Yvonne Hedges

Our first guest blog post comes from one of our own Scribes. And it's all about Remedial Writing. If you want to know more about Yvonne's school, read below or head to http://www.justwritenow.co.uk.

I am a SEN teacher of 25+ years, now specialising in helping people improve their handwriting. I am qualified to teach handwriting specifically through the National Handwriting Association and the Helen Arkell Centre for Dyslexia.

So what do I do and why? Well, I am passionate about handwriting – that is my motivation. Handwriting is a life skill. I find those most in need tend to be children struggling with schoolwork but equally, adults and professionals like doctors have also benefitted from my support and help.

In 2011, I decided to leave school and become a private handwriting tutor, founding Just Write to focus exclusively on handwriting. With those tutoring the normal subjects, handwriting is often offered as a 5 minute add-on at the end of a lesson, if requested. This is just not good enough. In spite of technology, school work is still centred around pen and paper, because it is still the most appropriate medium for young minds to use to commit their thoughts, ideas and creativity, which can then immediately be shared. Without the ability to express themselves in writing, they can become frustrated, lose confidence and ultimately fail to realise their full potential. School life marches on and you keep up or fall behind. This is what I saw happening and decided to do something about it.

I love teaching but found during my career that whilst writing is one of the foundations of a good education, it is rarely given the curriculum time it deserves; and different schools never have the same standards or teach the same style of handwriting. There is lack of time, knowledge and human resources. We now live in a world that has lots of left- handed writers, so no longer should this be a problem as there are so many writing tools to help them. Definitely no longer smudging of their writing as was the common belief!  It is no wonder then that many schoolchildren fail to achieve a reasonable style and speed, and uncorrected bad habits and poor letter formation follows them into adulthood. How many of your friends and relatives have you heard saying that their handwriting is awful when the subject is raised? How many of them can remember being taught writing skills? I am sure you will have a variety of answers which will not be consistent between them.

The good news is that handwriting can be improved whatever your age. The trick is not to think of it as a finite skill that you are either good at or not, like maths! Handwriting is a skill like playing a musical instrument.  To become good at it requires 2 things

1. a good understanding of technique and 2. the desire to practice and teach the hand muscles how to work!

Technique

This is about how you sit, hold your pencil, position your paper, how your writing area is lit and how much you press on the paper whilst writing. These are all correctable and will naturally give you the best opportunity to form letters and sentences in a legible and consistent style. In other words, all the practical things that will support a good practice writing session.

Practice

This is more complex. If we try really hard, we can often write sentences very slowly, but beautifully! What is required ultimately, is for us to be able to write beautifully, legibly and fast!

If you don’t already play the piano, imagine putting your hands and fingers onto the keys for the first time. There are a lot of questions. What does each note sound like? Which finger plays each note? How do you translate a piece of music on paper to the keys on the keyboard?  How is it possible to stretch your fingers to cover an octave or more with one hand?  How can your fingers hit the correct note every time, without fail?

Practice in this context is the activity of repetitive movement and applies equally to handwriting as it does to playing a musical instrument. With practice, you are creating ‘muscle memory’. That is, the muscles in your hands and fingers learn the movements and positions required to play a sequence of notes or to write a sequence of letters. However, humans are inherently lazy and if we can find a quicker way of doing this which doesn’t make your muscles ache as much, or require as much stretching or effort, we will do it. If the end result is OK rather than beautiful, we may be happy with that.

This is how bad habits are formed and they become your muscle memory. With handwriting, the difficulty comes when you try to read your ‘quick’ writing sometime later, or someone else does – like a teacher reading homework, or a nurse reading a Doctor’s notes. It might have been fully understandable when it was written, but not at some time later. University lecture notes, as an example, spring to mind here!

JustWrite classroom aRemedial handwriting lessons with the right techniques reset the hand’s muscle memory to recover the situation by practising handwriting using the basic principles outlined above, in a motivational way. There is a crossover between some elements of occupational health and an individual’s level of fine motor skills that are addressed on an individual basis.

By this, I mean trying to remedy this yourself by writing “The quick brown fox…” etc. over and over again might have some benefit, but it is pretty repetitive and boring and misses out on techniques that underpin good handwriting. Getting children to do this can create a resistance to handwriting which is counterproductive and takes time and patience to rebuild their confidence.

In my experience, it is only a very few focussed people whose handwriting will improve through online exercises and printable sheets, without having prior knowledge of how the elements of physiology and psychology combine to achieve better handwriting. Most end up with an achy wrist, and convince themselves there isn’t really much wrong with their handwriting after all! As a teacher, I incorporate different activities and games as well as physical exercises into lessons to achieve the muscle changes required without the obvious but boring repetitive writing tasks, (or achy wrists!), making practice in between more enjoyable too. In just the same way, a piano teacher will deliver greater benefit over a shorter period of time than a self-learner can.

My success as a handwriting teacher is based on a one-to-one relationship with the student with a variety of tasks and exercises to keep interest and practice alive! I enjoy handwriting so much and love to see the written word, I even write as a Scribe for Inkpact 😊 

Yvonne Hedges - Scribe Tribe, Super Scribe

Being a Scribe

Being a Scribe

For the first proper blog post I thought I'd speak a bit about what it is to be a Scribe, and why we choose to be part of this community. I was inspired by a Facebook post on our group, where I asked the question and was blown away with the replies. I then, of course, also thought of my own reasons, and now I'm just compiling all these feelings into a stream of words. I hope you feel inspired and proud to belong to the Scribe Tribe after reading this!​

When I came across Inkpact, back at the end of 2016, I could not believe my luck: someone would actually pay me to hand write notes, cards and letters!? How could that be a thing??? Sign me up!

I submitted my sample and waited. I could say I even resorted to biting my nails, but I do that even when not waiting for important news, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I say I was anxiously awaiting the result of my application.

My yes soon came (talk about good news to begin 2017 with) and with it the lovely writer pack with my own new fountain pen and light pad! I loved all of it and when my first job came along I gladly started to write.

Now, my first job was super stressful, don’t get me wrong! An A4 letter jam-packed with information and I admit, I stayed up until almost 3am the night before my deadline to finish the job. This could’ve been reason enough for me to just call it a day and quit. Believe me, you mess with my sleep and I’ll resent you for life! (Well, maybe not for life, but I’ll certainly almost growl at you the following day).

But something made me stay. I couldn’t pin point what it was until my second job came along. Not only my personal joy in writing, the almost egotistical joy of seeing my pretty hand writing embellish a card (oh, Tania, cut it out! So full of yourself!!!), but also the message, the knowing someone would smile when they’d receive the acceptance card, or feel motivated to work harder, when the beautiful copy of the rejection messages inspired instead of demotivate them. I was hooked. That was it! I was a writer. I was a Scribe.

I started to dig deeper into the company, I met Charlotte, Andrew, and the office team. I enjoyed the banter and ease of the company. The inspiration of pursuing a passion until you succeed. 

I was lucky enough to start working in the office early/mid 2018 and by the end of the year I was also given the chance to manage the actual community. And that’s when I started to meet more of the other Scribes. And man, are we a great bunch! We have moms, freelancers, lovers of Nature, sippers of tea, curious, ingenious, smart and silly and overall “good eggs” everywhere you look! And I am so happy to be part of this group.

As for why YOU are a Scribe, well, I asked, and you all pointed out the obvious love for fountain pens, stationery and beautiful handwriting, the inspirational CEO (gooooo Charlotte!), the opportunities and passions, the challenges, the collaborations with charities, the freedom to work from home and on your own time, the talented people all around, and most importantly, the sense of community. Anything else I missed or you’d like to add? Leave a comment!

So now, our path continues, and we can continue to go on, not hand in hand, but hand in pen. Together. Being part of the Scribe Tribe.

Tania, Community Manager