Searching the net I found a site (http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html) that was headed
Wingdings character set and equivalent Unicode characters.
This showed that the Unicode Hex values for the pencil and scissors are U+270F and U+2702 respectively.
Not every font has every glyph in it -- so it's quite likely that your second attempt will not work using the wingdings font which places its glyphs in lower slots. Likewise, just because chinese/arabic/cyrillic characters exist in unicode doesn't mean that they'll be in a given font.
In MacOS X, you can see which fonts have a given unicode character defined by going to the Character Palette (look in Edit -> Special Characters ...), and look in the 'Font Variations' panel (you might need to expand it), and it'll show you which fonts have that given glyph -- in my case, 270F is only in Zaph Dingbats, but 2702 is in Zaph Dingbats and Hiragino. If I use any other font, I get a place holder to mark it as an unknown character.
I have no idea how to do similar lookups on other operating systems
