We’ve made it to June! One more month left in the school year, and everything’s all leafed out and green and glorious. I’m enjoying the instability of the weather with the wind and sun and rain alternating so you never get bored. And we’re slowly discovering our garden as new things bloom every few days. I have lilacs now! I missed those since I moved away from Old Ottawa South where the neighbour’s bush was so huge I felt like I had my own. But now I do have my own! They’re almost done but the roses seem to be starting next.
Bright pink rose blosso in my yard.
I did have a strange flare of allergies for a few hours this morning, but mostly I’ve been good to just enjoy my new/old habitat except for one week of sniffles that might have been miserable except I enjoyed the excuse to WFH. (I don’t have regular seasonal allergies, but I do hit something once every few years.) My poor dog is desperate to get let out on the deck but the yard isn’t fenced yet and he already ran out onto the bike path the one time I let him into the yard off leash to see if he’d stay behind the bushes, so he’s stuck on a leash for now. Looking forwards to when he and I can just hang out in the yard without a tether, though.
June 2026 Stationery choices: sticker sheets featuring birds and foxes and forest-y motifs, 4 pens and inks (all described further in the post)
Stickers
- Seasonal birds from Mind Wave (for tracking days that I write)
- Sparkly orange birds from byjessicaelena.com (via stickii)
- Foxes and forest vibes by campmustelid.com (via stickii)
I finally decided to try an actual stickii subscription starting this month. It’s too many stickers per month for my usage so I either need to go more nuts with the stickers or skip months occasionally, but I really missed getting a monthly surprise in the mail. Maybe that’s a bad reason but I love the artists they get in and it’s a hard time to be an artist right now and if I’m going to spend money on a surprise pack, affordable sticker sheets and paying for art that I will use eventually seems pretty reasonable. I use 2-3 sticker sheets per month right now and I think they send 7 so they’re definitely going to pile up, but also they’re sticker sheets so they’re small and my current binders are getting pretty empty at the moment so it’s not like it would be if I was adding to my already overflowing yarn collection. (I bought two balls of yarn this year and I’m cut off until I knit at least the one for this month’s knitalong. Which I haven’t started because I’m already doing a different knitalong but soon!) We’ll see if I can manage to cut myself off once the sticker binders start to get full.
After a year of mostly not spending thanks to unemployment and then the large number of costs we incurred thanks to the move, it’s been nice to pick up some art supplies and the occasional book, as well as slowly working out my new charitable donations and subscriptions. I’m trying to choose a few treats and causes so I feel like I’m contributing to the things I care about financially and also not like 100% of my salary is going to bills.
Fountain Pens & Inks
- Pilot Metropolitan <M> (green) – Dominant Industry Tuna & Olives (Wonder Pen Exclusive)
- Pilot Metropolitan <CM> (red) – Dominant Industry Ginger Chicken (Wonder Pen Exclusive)
- Monteverde Monza <flex> (clear) – KWZ all that glitters Stardust Blue
- Conklin Durograph <stub> (green) – Diamine Laurel
The green Metropolitan is new (from Wonder Pens, bought with the ink). It had been living in my work stationery setup with much success before I swapped it in to the journal instead. I love this ink and pen combo. This one came with a twist piston converter instead of a squeeze converter, which is nice because while I don’t mind the squeeze converter you can’t tell how much ink is left so I had eventually replaced the one on my original red metro. I wonder when they changed that?
The older red Metropolitan with Ginger Chicken in it is also great. I’ve had a lot of mis-matches with that pen but this ink seems to be a great fit, maybe one of the ones I’ve liked most in that pen so far, since that nib needs an ink that’s… lubricated? wet? smooth? I’m not sure what the issue is but you can really feel it when the ink isn’t working out in the CM nib because it feels all scratchy and awkward. I love this nib but it’s definitely not as easy to use as the medium.
The Monza, however, is not working out very well and it apparently ate all the glitter — a bit of a surprise since I’ve never had a problem with the KWZ “all that glitters” line before! Normally it’s so glittery that I can barely see the base colour but the one line I’ve written with the Monza so far had zero. The Monza was an impulse buy on super sale because it comes with three nibs (fine, medium and flex) plus converters so I figured I’d like at least one of them. But it’s such a boring looking pen that I’m not really compelled to pick it up, so it hasn’t been inked much. I thought a shimmer ink might help make it more fun, but this one clearly isn’t working out and it’s the shimmer ink I’ve had the least trouble with in other pens so maybe the feed just isn’t great for shimmer? Not sure. I’ll give it a few more tries because one line of text isn’t a fair test and I haven’t used it for a full journal entry yet, but I may swap the ink into a different pen before the month is done. This pen is a good candidate for my work setup since it’s small, light, and has a good clip, so it may get used there next with a brighter standard ink instead.
The Conklin has also been sitting in a drawer for a while: another impulse buy at deep discount that I didn’t love once it arrived. It’s a really lovely pen that writes beautifully, but it hurts my hands to use for too long and I’m not sure why. It doesn’t seem that much heavier than my other pens, or bigger. I have other stub nibs so I don’t think it’s the extra effort of writing with the stub. It doesn’t feel scratchy or anything. But it’s… tiring. Maybe it’s where the weight sits? Something about the ergonomics of that pen is just not for me, and maybe this is one of those pens I wouldn’t have bought if I’d gone to a store in person and tried it. I’m going to give it a bit of a go this month since it’s been so long since I used it, but I suspect it’ll wind up earmarked to give away to someone who will love it more. It’s great with this ink and it is writing well so far this month, but there’s not much point in me keeping a pen that I don’t want to use because it makes my hand feel bad.
Usage notes from last month
Tried two new pens last month. Neither is completely new to me because I’ve used similar things, but the physical pens themselves aren’t ones I’d used before. So how’d that go?
A peach 30th anniversary Sailor Fude with birthday sparkles on it, set against a rainbow rug.
The Sailor Fude pictured above is from Toronto Pen Shop and thus one of my 2026 orders. I love the fude nib dip pen that I have from them and had long wanted a pen, but the colours were uninspiring to me. When I found that there was a sparkly limited edition version for their 30th anniversary I picked one up. I absolutely love writing with it, which is not a surprise since it’s pretty similar to the dip pen nib I use for all my swatching and first writing attempts with each new ink. The feed keeps it a bit less wet than the sort-of-feed that comes with my dip pen which is basically a little plastic cover that holds a drop of ink in rather than something that keeps a steady flow. This feed is nicer and more consistent, as one might expect. I also tried inking some drawings with it with black ink (before I filled it up with the Brilliant Mint) and that was fun although I think I prefer the fineliner I normally use since it has waterproof ink and I can paint over it. I’ve been doing a lot of watercolour lately! The thing that surprised me most about this pen is that it is waaaay longer than my other pens, to the point where I have to kind of angle it into the pen case I usually use. That said, I really enjoyed writing with it so I expect it’ll get inked up every few months.
I *did* have to rinse out the Sailor Fude nib because it felt like it was drying out this month, something I seldom need to do unless I keep an ink in for more than a month, but I’m hesitant to blame the pen because I’ve had a lot of pen skipping since I switched to the MD Paper grid notebook I’m currently using. I strongly suspect that it’s something about the way the oils on my hands react to the paper, and since I’d been using the MD paper for drawing as well as journal writing, I’d been touching it a lot more than usual. This wasn’t the ony pen that gave me trouble — I also had to rinse out my Kaweco Liliput in April multiple times and that’s a pen that’s never given me trouble before. And I think a few of the others had occasional skips. Trying to make things better, I moved my drawing to other notebooks/papers and started using a shield for my hand while writing and I’ve had less trouble. I did notice when painting with the new inks that the grid itself takes ink a bit differently, so it could be also affecting me? there’s a lot more printing in the grid vs the dot grid I usually use, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to cause the kind of “feels like your pen is drying out” skipping I’ve seen. That said, this notebook is pleasant but is probably not going on my “to restock” list, and I might find a non-journal/non-fountain pen use for the other two that came in the pack. I’ve got a bunch of other notebooks to try before I’m likely to come back to them anyhow!
Platinum Preppy Wa purple pen with cats on it. It’s sitting on a clear case containing blue and purple washi dots.
I had also picked up a new Platinum Preppy Wa pen last year that I hadn’t used yet — the purple one with the kitties on it — and because JetPens was doing a “get a free preppy with your order” I had also picked up a second regular Preppy with a wider nib and swapped the nibs. The Preppy “medium” is a bit thicker than the Pilot medium, which I hadn’t realized, and it actually looked a lot like the Pelikan Pura Broad that I was using at the same time. That was a surprise but not a bad one; I like thicker nibs for journal writing. Rather than cleaning out the purple Preppy I’ve moved it over to my work notebook and we’ll see if I like that nib there or if I switch back to the original thinner nib next time I use a Preppy for work notes. I’m glad to have the option, though — mostly my Preppy Wa pens wind up on todo list duty right now so it’d nice to have a nib that I like for longer writing available.
Ooly Duo fountain pen/highlighter combo showing a crack by the orange highlighter end of the pen.
Bad news about the Ooly Writer’s Duo I’d been using: it’s developed a crack that is really annoying when you want to uncap the highlighter side, because the whole highlighter unit with the cartridge pulls out unless you pinch the pen body pretty aggressively. It’s also developed a lot of cosmetic damage — scrapes on the gradient surface across the pen. Looks like I paid $13 for the set of 3 a bit over a year ago, so this is the second cheapest fountain pen I own and a year of use isn’t bad, plus it got carried around a lot in my todo list bag even before I put it into my work set, but it’s not even out of ink on either side yet and I was surprised because I haven’t had even a random free conference pen fail like this in a long time. The Platinum Preppy Wa pen with koi on it that was my other todo list notebook pen at the same time and basically got the same treatment is still going strong — no cracks, no damage to the artwork on the pen. I don’t think I’d recommend the Ooly pen unless you’re intending to treat it as disposable OR you don’t tend to carry your pens around much. But the fountain pen wrote well and I did enjoy using it this past year. The highlighter tip is also looking a little beat up, but having it on hand for work notes turned out to be really handy, so much so that I wound up buying some other less neon highlighters to add to my kit. I’ll keep using it until it’s out of ink but I’m not sure it’s going to be worth refilling the cartridge as I’d originally planned. Maybe I’ll find a way to repurpose it, but it’s probably going to wind up at the back of my pen/ink drawer for a while once it runs out of ink. I’ve got two more so they may go to live in my desk at work or at home when I finally get around to starting the cartridges, and we’ll see if they last better that way.
It’s been fun to add a bit to my collection with a couple of stationary orders, but I’m also enjoying rotating through older pens. I’ve got some notebooks I’m eager to try and a lot of inks to play with over the coming months! One thing I did do was sit down and organize my swatches. I had been keeping the inkvent ones separately so I’d actually try all the new inks, but I decided it was time to integrate them so I can flip through a whole rainbow of colours instead. I use an A5 binder with plastic card pages and papers cut to card size. It’s made it a lot easier to choose a palette for the month. I do need to label the pigment inks since those aren’t quite as obvious from the swatches as the shimmer and sheen inks are, but other than that I’m pretty happy with the new setup. It’s helped me not be tempted to get any more ink, since I actually have the type of collection I wanted to have when i started this hobby now. I’ll keep myself open to special inks like the Wonder Pens exclusive ones and I’ll see over the coming months if I find myself reaching for a colour that’s not there. But it’s a good spread! Now I just need to start more seriously working on that “painting with fountain pen ink” goal I set for myself. I’ve done some but definitely not enough!