Trying something new: I haven’t been reviewing books because it takes a long time to write reviews on my phone, and I’d been working on reducing my phone screen time. But I’ve been using my computer more to write fanfic so I’m going to see if weekly book posts are more likely to happen now than they were last time I tried.
My books
(first one I own, other two from the library)
Kitemaster by Jim Hines. I accidentally pre-ordered this twice, which probably gives you some idea of how I felt about it. A young woman mourning her husband goes to release his spirit kite only to discover she has developed a rare magical gift, and she soon attracts the attention of some very powerful people… I loved the worldbuilding around kite magic (safety lines! The spirit kites!) and the sky serpents and the poetic legends about dragons and the evil queen and the sky pirates and the race of monkey-like people. Maybe it feels particularly good to me right now because I’ve been playing a game which includes a lot of gliding around in the sky, but I wanted to live in this world. There’s also a lot about grief and cultural traditions around mourning in there, in a way that I had to stop and let it sink in sometimes. In a good way.
Halfway There – A graphic novel about being half Japanese and half American, but mostly it was about finding yourself and depression. Her experience of people’s weird reactions to her being “hafu” resonated but the self-loathing not so much.
The Roommate by Rosie Danan – I’ve read a few from her and they’re all different. I find it kind of hilarious that I felt like this one was less believable than the werewolf one but honestly I love a kind of absurd premise as long as the characters are fun. And they are! Just… I’d recommend Fan Service (the werewolf book) over this one. It’s the most recent one and I think the characters are even better despite the premise being more absurd.
Kid books:
Catnapped is a repeat, so kiddo liked it enough to get it out again. Or he liked that it has a cat in it and he’s got this thing where he wants his allergic dad to fake sneeze for fake cats so my kid is extra motivated to get cat books out of the library.
Bob and Joss get lost – ok but no repeat requests on this one
Amazing Grace – never read it, kid wasn’t interested. (Recall: we get mystery bags from the library and not all of them are winners for him)
Storm Whale in Winter – spawned some good conversations about snow safety but no repeat requests
Little Blue Truck Makes a Friend – kid had fun with the animal noises but was mad I made him read some of this so it was slower going than it could have been.
Charlie Chooses – very cute, lots of dogs, we read this a few times.
Toby – another repeat. cute dog, kind of melancholy story so i was surprised he got it out again.
Board Game
Despite the giant box this is mostly a card/dice game where you build a little city and money based on dice roles hitting your numbers. None of the cards are secret held in your hand, so that was great for my kid’s reading level (he can read but it’s a lot of work and he gets tired of doing it), and the rounds are pretty fast and the rules not too complicated. We may buy a copy of this one.
Honestly, I was planning to phone this one in and just use some pens that had ink in them already because I was feeling so burned out partway through a week of solo parenting, but then I pulled out the stickers and the dopamine hit was good enough that I had a nice time putting stuff together instead of feeling like it was a chore or something. This writing a blog post part felt like a chore then but I’m a bit more relaxed today and also I have to sit here with a heat pack on my neck for a bit to get the muscle to relax so I might as well type.
Fountain Pens and Inks
Pilot E95S <M> – Pilot iroshizuku kon-peki. At least it will be once I finish the last few drops of ama-iro that are in there right now.
Pilot Kakuno <M> – Sailor Ink Studio 750. Because I wanted the pen cap and ink to match.
Pilot Metropolitan <CM> – Pilot iroshizuku yama-budo. This is the cartridge that’s been in there a while, and I think it might be drying out because the ink is showing up as a lot more brown than in the original swatch, but maybe it’s just that the sheen is really working on this paper. It actually looks *great* with the stickers so I’m not sad.
TWSBI Eco-T <stub> – Colorverse Gyeongnyeolbi Yeoldo. This pen apparently had some sparkle stuck in it from the KWZ stardust so it’s got surprise shimmer ink going on until that runs out. The ink is slower to dry than I expected but I like the colour.
I’d been intending to pull out a Pelikan Twist I’d been using for todo lists, but apparently it has run out of ink so it went into the cleaning pile instead. I’m going to see if I have a converter that will fit it or maybe refill the cartridge, but I’m not going to worry about that right away.
Stickers
Science kitties from Taylor_ross1 via Stickii
Calendar & flowerpot kitties from By Mossy Pine
Bees and crocuses from The Latest Kate
Notes from April
The blank Clairefontaine Triomphe notebook is working out pretty well even though I don’t really write straight. I did a tiny bit of drawing in it and liked it for that as I’d hoped.
I tried a Hongdian M1 in April but it had a super scratchy nib so I pretty much hated it. Worse than my other fine nibs. I’ve cleaned it out now but haven’t sat down to see if it’s fixable or what. I liked the form factor okay but I think it was pretty much a waste of money for me.
I had this idea to do some socks tracking how much time I was spending staring at my phone. A lot of knitters track things like temperatures, but that’s never really interested me, so I set about thinking about data that I’d like to track and could do with relatively minimal effort. (Some people may be good at tracking; I am not naturally inclined to it.) My phone provides me a screen time breakdown, so I thought that would be a good candidate and started taking a look at it to see what colours I’d want to use and what increments of time should represent one row and so on.
But what I discovered, when I started looking, was that I regularly had my phone screen on for more than 5 hours a day. That seemed like… a lot. I felt a lot the way I’d felt about TV in my 20s: it wasn’t the worst thing ever, but I could use the time for things I’d enjoy more. (Also for getting a PhD, but that’s probably not completely related to my dislike of TV.)
So instead of setting up my knitting project (which I still haven’t done but probably will eventually), I set about figuring out how to reduce how much time I spent looking at my phone.
Looking at my data
Once I started looking at my data, I realized there *were* some extenuating circumstances: I’d often spend an hour with my phone open to a knitting pattern but it’s not like I was actually looking at it the whole time. Sometimes I’d accidentally leave my tea timer on screen for an hour while my tea oversteeped (a tragedy for me as it gets too tannin-y). Sometimes the screen time was due to having GPS navigation on, which, again, didn’t feel like it should count. But some days I really was just looking at my phone that often.
One of the things that helped the most was having a big widget on the screen of my phone telling me how much time I’d already spent using the device (I put it beside my weather widget where I’d tend to look). I paired this with stickers in my journal every time I went below my target amount of time, so then I found myself correcting if I felt like I’d used too much time for the day already.
Another thing that helped was just setting the screen auto-shutoff to be more aggressive (30s vs a minute, making it so apps couldn’t keep the screen on) so I wasn’t having it on by accident. That helped me figure out where I was really spending my time, and did reduce my numbers just by itself (and improved my battery usage considerably!)
Removing low-value time sinks
My phone actually up and died partway through this project, in a way that I couldn’t carry over all my settings and apps. And that turned out to be convenient for this because I had to make conscious decisions about what to install. But also inconvenient because I lost all my screen time data from before this project so it’s very hard to compare!
Things that went:
Most mobile games. A lot of these have kind of dark-pattern things to keep you logging in each day but once I broke the streaks because I had no phone for a week I decided I could just… not do that. I kept a few but I’m finding I play them less because they just don’t feel as rewarding as my Switch games now.
Removed most social media, tuned what was left to have less stuff (mostly turning off boosts for most people in Mastodon, being more aggressive about my filters, unfollowing a few people who weren’t bringing me joy but *were* bringing a lot of posts.)
Threw out most of my RSS feeds. I used to follow a lot more news and craft stuff, but the news was making me miserable and the craft stuff was encouraging me to buy supplies I didn’t need. I kept enough so I could be an informed voter for my riding and read my friends blogs, then culled down the rest.
Most notifications got turned off. Wow, there were a lot of notifications.
Swapped my phone to “flip for silent” and put a pretty case on it so I was more likely to flip it. This doesn’t seem like it should have made a big difference because I already had it in do not disturb frequently, but just taking it out of my pocket and putting it down made just that little bit more friction when I went to “just quick check something” so it wound up helping.
Finding other things to do
The big things I wanted to more of were: play actually good games (instead of crappy mobile dark pattern nonsense) and read books/fanfic. So I started actually carrying around my ereader in my pocket and learned how to stuff it with fanfic so I didn’t have to read a whole darned novel when I just wanted to do something for a few minutes while I was waiting for my tea or whatever, and I fell in love with playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on my Nintendo Switch so I started carrying that around in my knitting back (too big for my pockets, alas. Though I did also pull out my 3DS which is more pocketable.)
An old e-reader with a white cover that has flowers on it, and an Animal Crossing special edition Nintendo switch with green and blue joycons attached.
It’s kind of goofy to be proud of replacing some of my phone time with looking at different screens, but I am getting a *lot* more enjoyment out of my gaming time, and since I’m not *scrolling* for a tiny screen while holding a device, I can enjoy reading longer stuff while knitting. It’s also been great for connecting with my kid, as we’re currently both playing Zelda games and sharing tips and showing off stuff we’ve done.
The amusing thing about switching to my ereader was that it forced me to spend more time on my actual computer to transfer files, which encouraged me to spend more time doing personal writing. You haven’t seen this on the blog yet because I’ve been writing fiction rather than blog posts, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I’m not finishing a novel anytime soon, but I feel like I’m stretching some mental muscles and having fun. So far I’m mostly writing fanfic which is nice because people actually read it. I’ve also found great delight in writing more comments on fanfic that I enjoyed. It’s probably obvious in hindsight, but when you write to tell an author how much you appreciate them a lot of them write back with really thoughtful responses (I know, I know, who knew writers could write) and after all the AI crap I had to deal with for Google Summer of Code this year it’s felt amazing to talk to humans without some chatbot in between. Honestly, it feels pleasantly minorly transgressive to be writing un-monetizable fanfic by hand given the state of capitalism and art right now.
I haven’t really been into fanfic since the last time I was seriously burned out after finishing my PhD thesis and moving to the US and developing both migraines and a problem requiring surgery. (It was a rough two years as much as it was a great two years.) So I’m reading fanfic again and, no surprise, I’m hideously burned out now because of *gestures at everything*. I’m in a completely different fandom than I was last time and doing different stuff (last time I was an artist!) but it’s still helping me cope with the burnout as well as changing what my screen time looks like.
Beyond the “let’s just use different screens” strategy, I’ve been reading more books and starting to do some drawing and I continue to knit although I don’t think I’ve done particularly *more* of that since I already knit a lot. I did a decent stint where I was spinnning until March but I’m taking a break on that right now. Now that the weather is nicer, maybe I’ll get some biking time in too.
So how did it work?
Well, it’s May 2025 and I started putting stickers on my calendar in January 2025. I’ve gone from “regularly looking at my phone for 5+ hours per day” to “only exceeding 3 hours a couple of times per month, often with extenuating circumstances like being sick.”
I probably could have gone lower than my new normal of around 2.5 hours on average, but I found when tracked it that all the days I went over 2hrs it included stuff that brought actual connection: chatting with friends or editing and sharing pictures or writing about books. So I’m not inclined to go any lower than that, although I *did* move some writing stuff to my computer so it doesn’t show up on the phone time tracking when i realized how long it took me to write some things on my phone.
The greatest result has been more connection time with my kid: not because we’re gaming together (we already did that) but because I now am playing the single player games he likes as well. This started before I started really focusing on phone time, back when I bought Echoes of Wisdom for us in the fall, but I’ve been happy to find that the single player gaming doesn’t have to be a “selfish” use of my time since we share some similar tastes in games. It hasn’t really increased our offline time much because the phone screen time was happening when we were both exhausted, but now when I sit and he wants to watch videos after school while he eats his snack and rests for a bit, I’m getting gaming or reading time in instead of scrolling while I wait for him to finish. It’s not perfect — I’m more grumpy about being interrupted during some games than I would have been in boredom mode on my phone — but I think it’s better overall.
What’s next?
I feel like I’ve made the habit change I wanted and I’m going to stop putting stickers in my planner almost every day (though they’re weirdly motivating, so I’ll likely keep them for some new habit tracking). I’ll keep the screen time reminders and other phone setting changes I made. I’m not intending to be quite so aggressive about cutting myself off after 2h, but I *have* bought a new game and new books now that I have time for them, and I’ve got a bunch of writing in progress so I feel like I’m at the point where the change will stick.
I might finally get around to knitting the screen time socks that I had planned, now that I feel better about what the data will show about me!
Overall, I learned some about my habits and made a good change. Go me!
Let’s try getting this posted before the end of the month this time! Here’s what I’m using for journal/calendar stuff this month, with some mini reviews of the supplies I’ve used already.
Notebook
As I mentioned last month, I’m starting a new notebook for April even though my iroful one isn’t quite full, because I wasn’t loving the slower dry time for day to day journalling and decided to use the last pages for playing with new inks instead. The new notebook is a Clairefontaine Triomphe, which is blank inside. I used to prefer blank notebooks because I liked them better for doodling, but I’ve spent a few years using dot grid ones now so we’ll see how this goes. So far, the paper is nice and I like that I can use very differently sized pens and write in different sizes easily (in dot grid, my stub nib writing feels a bit cramped), and the dry times are short enough that I’m not constantly smearing my todo lists when I flip back and forth. I would like a slightly stiffer cover, but I’ve got a couple of pencil boards stuck in there the same way I did with the Iroful notebook, and it’s working well enough. I wish the Hobonichi one had a darker set of guide lines on it so I could use them (they’re too pale to show through this paper) but I can always print out my own guide lines if I decide I want them. For now I’m just letting my writing be what it is.
Fountain Pens & Inks
I impulse bought an “Ooly Writer’s Duo” set for US $13 from Powell’s when I was getting the new Seanen McGuire InCryptid book. These are fountain pens on one side and highlighters on the other. The fountain pen side uses a cartridge, I don’t think the highligher side is as easily refillable. I don’t know if they’re a standard size and I haven’t bothered to look it up since it’ll take me a few months to use each cartridge. I’m currently only using the pink/orange one since I don’t want to have too many cartridges open at once and I already have a few pens in rotation that have them. It’s approximately a fine nib, but thankfully not too scratchy. The fountain pen colour is less bright than the pen and the highlighter is more bright, but both are nice enough. Maybe I’ll remember to take more photos later, but so far I’d say they’re a nice deal for $13 and will likely find a niche as todo list or calendar pens, though I think they’re smooth enough that they’ll be ok for longer journal entries too if I want.
The other pen ink combos are repeats from last month:
TWSBI Eco <medium> – Diamine Noble Fir (bright green with shimmer)
Nahvalur Original+ <stub> – Diamine Aurora Borealis (dark teal with red sheen)
Pilot E95S <medium> – Pilot Iroshizuku ama iro (sky blue)
We’re a week in to the month and I’ve already had to pull the Nahvalur out of rotation for cleaning because it went from “occasional hard start” to “annoying to use” pretty quickly. I’ve replaced it with a new pen:
This is my first time using this M1 and I don’t love it. It’s got a scratchy nib that feels like writing with a mechanical pencil, which isn’t great for me ergonomically so it makes my hand ache after a while. I’ll give it at least a few more tries but it may get pulled from the rotation before the end of the month too. The ink is lovely as always, though!
Stickers
All from stickii again! Flower party dogs, snail stamps, and cute little critter icons. The last one I’m using for calendar tracking. I need more sources of tiny stickers for that!
I took these pictures back at the beginning of March and never posted them, so you get them on the last day instead!
Image Description: A set of supplies for my journal in March 2025: three sets of dino themed stickers, 1 pencil, 2 thin washi tapes, one wooden mechanical pencil, 5 fountain pens with inks (described further in the post)
Stickers
The cat calendar sticker, as always, is from By Mossy Pine.
The dino stickers are all from an old stickii pack I grabbed during a sale called “Rawr!” or something similar.
March’s Fountain Pen/Ink Combos:
Kaweco sport <medium> filled with Diamine Twilight, a dark blue-black ink. This ink was a present!
Nahvalur Original+ <stub> filled with Diamine Aurora Borealis, a dark teal ink with a very tiny amount of red sheen. This ink was also a present!
TWSBI Eco <medium> filled with Diamine Noble Fir from the 2024 inkvent calendar, a bright green ink with shimmer. This one carried over from last month’s palette.
Pilot Metropolitan <CM> filled with Pilot Iroshizuku yama-budo, a dark fuschia ink with some green sheen. I’m using a refilled cartridge to see if I like it better than the included converter, and it *is* nice to be able to see how much ink is left, but it means I’m reluctant to change the ink (and potentially wear out the cartridge faster).
Pilot E95S <medium> filled with Pilot Iroshizuku ama-iro, a bright sky-blue ink.
Since this is the end of the month, I’ll say that all of these worked out pretty well, but I did have a bunch of hard starts on the Nahvalur pen, likely due to my inexperience using a vacuum pen (I’ve had this since the fall but haven’t always had it in rotation). I’d hoped to maybe use this as a travel pen eventually but I probably should have gotten a thinner nib on it for that to work better, I don’t know. It’s kind of a moot point as travel has become unappealing at the moment.
I’m also realizing that I *really* appreciate the converters when it comes to changing inks every month, and the piston fillers can be kind of a chore in comparison. I may need to rethink how often I change inks and plan my palettes differently so more colours carry over depending on which pen they’re in. I’ve slowed in my pen acquisitions now that I’ve got a range of nibs and such to try, but I did pick up a small box of cartridge-filled ones as an impulse buy at Powell’s so you’ll see at least one of those next month.
I haven’t finished this iroful journal yet, but I’ve decided to leave the rest of the pages for pen testing and ink swatches since I like the paper for that but don’t love it for writing journal entries or todo lists. The plan is to pull out a notebook with faster drying paper for April.
People actually responded to my January ink palette so I’m encouraged enough to post one for February! I’m starting with just 4 inks this month. My current plan is to also rotate in some of the other pens I have inked if I want a few more colours (I have a few on my desk for todo lists/work notes plus a few more in my backpack for when I’m out and about).
(Image description is below with better formatting)
February Inks
Diamine Cranberry (from Inkvent 2024)
Diamine Noble Fir (from Inkvent 2024)
KWZ All that glitters – Stardust Blue
Pilot Iroshizuku – Momiji
KWZ All that glitters is meant to have a special formula that helps keep the shimmer in solution longer and I’m hoping to compare it with how the shimmer works in Noble Fir, so they’re both in the two TWSBI demonstrator pens.
February Pens
Hongdian N8 Maple (long blade nib)
Pilot Elite E95S (medium)
TWSBI Eco-T Clear (stub)
TWSBI Eco Glow Green (medium)
The Pilot Elite was my birthday gift and I love it so much. It’s a weird shaped pen with that long long cap but it works really well in my hand. The Hongdian N8 is new because I had a gift cert from work and I wanted to try the long blade nib, which I gather has line variation similar to a stub but the direction in which it’s thick vs thin is reversed. I only just inked it up so I can’t say much more yet!
February Stickers
frogs and food (stickii advent 2024, Sinnin Studios)
something valentines-y (stickii advent 2024, Neko Mori Arts)
dogs with sweaters (stickii, didn’t have an artist name on the sheet, at photo in bottom of post)
February calendar cat (By Mossy Pine, in photo at bottom of post)
polar bears (The Latest Kate, not pictured)
This is *probably* more stickers than I’ll actually use but I’ve had some problems with the iroful journal paper having fingerprint-like sections that don’t really retain ink very well, so I’m keeping extra stickers on hand so I can cover those up and not be irritated by them as I find them. I’m guessing that they are actual fingerprints of the folk handling the paper during coating since the marks have ridges and whorls if I inspect them closely, but I don’t really know.
A side note: the iroful paper has been a fun experience for showcasing sheening inks, but it’s just irritating enough as a journal that I probably won’t buy another one: there’s the fingerprints where ink won’t take, the fact that the signatures are glued together so periodically it won’t lay perfectly flat, the thinner cover so I have to have a separate rigid writing board in when I’m writing, and the slower dry times for the coated paper which isn’t so bad for most of my journal use but is obnoxious when I’m adding art or flipping back and forth to todo lists and book review sections. I might swap to a new journal after February and save the remaining pages for ink testing depending on how many pages I use in February and how grumpy I am about the paper by then. I’m currently about halfway through the journal after 1.5 months.
Washi tape
purple with gold hearts 3mm
fuschia 1mm
I originally bought the teensy shiny tapes for nail art, but since I haven’t been doing that lately they’ve become great as a replacement for drawing lines.
February Ink palette + stickers
Inks:
Diamine Cranberry (from Inkvent 2024)
Diamine Noble Fir (from Inkvent 2024)
KWZ All that glitters – Stardust Blue
Pilot Iroshizuku – Momiji
Stickers:
– dogs with sweaters (stickii)
– Calendar cats (By Mossy Pine)
February has historically been my least favourite month because it’s when the darkness is starting to get to me and the weather is all over the map, and living in the US right now isn’t the greatest, but I’m trying to focus on things that bring me joy so I’ve got the energy to quietly (and non-publicly) deal with the stuff that doesn’t. I’ve been making some inroads into improving some stuff that wasn’t working for me at my day job, and I’m slowly recovering from the flu (or maybe it’s covid again) that my husband brought back from a work trip. Glad to spend some time appreciating inks and stickers and doggies in sweaters.
Happy new year! I haven’t decided if I’m going to record my ink selections on my blog all year, since they’re already recorded in my journal itself, but I like seeing other people’s choices so here’s January’s inks!
Image Description: My January ink palette (the colours I’m using for writing in my journal this month) surrounded by the fiber and yarn from my spindle spin, which has a very similar set of colours. The fiber is a slow gradient of pink to purple to blue and back again and it’s visible in two braids, one of which is attached to a cross-arm spindle, and two “yarn turtles” (wound squarish balls of yarn made on the spindle). The ink colours are Diamine Lullaby (light pink/purple), Diamine Baltic Breeze (light blue with coppery shimmer), Diamine Nutmeg (grey with gold shimmer), Pilot Iroshizuku Yama-budo (dark fuschia), De Atrementis Cyan Blue Copper (bright blue with copper shimmer) and Diamine Cosmic Glow (medium blue with pink/fuchsia sheen).
I didn’t particularly intend for the ink and fiber to match, but I had them both sitting out on the table in my office and decided it was fun to photograph them together. The fiber colourway is listed as “omni pride” which I think is very similar to the bi pride flag. I like the richness of the colours and the gradient — I’d been planning to ply the singles together and get something with a bit of marling but I may chain ply instead because I’m so fond of the colour shifts I’m getting in the singles as they are.
Image Description: Short January book review notes written my January palette of inks with different fountain pens. I haven’t gotten around to writing out the text of these reviews yet but the important part here is to see the colours together showing the pink/purple/blue giving a slightly dreamy vibe because so many of the colours are very light. There’s also a cute “cat sleeping on a crescent moon” sticker visible at the edge of the photo where my journalling pages start.
The inks are a little less saturated and honestly the Lullaby is probably a bit too light for this pen/ink/paper combo so I may switch it out later. But I like the dreamy vibe and it goes well with my sleepy cat sticker sheet! Lullaby is weirdly fun colour to write with because of the way it dries on this paper so I’m enjoying it right now even if future me may have regrets when I try to read things.
You may notice that most of this is from the Diamine Inkvent Black box; this is because I honestly don’t own that much other ink. Most of my collection was half-empty sample vials before I bought the inkvent calendar. My goal is to use the inkvent inks heavily in 2025 and see how far I get before I decide if I’m doing another ink countdown at the end of 2025. I really enjoyed the whole process of swatching and using new inks every day for most of December, but I am very concerned that if I do this every year I’ll be over-run with more ink than I can use. So step 1 is using at least a few inkvent inks every month and we’ll see how it goes!
This is my 10th year setting “fiber goals” as a fun way to direct my crafting for the year. I’ve come to feel like setting goals around creativity and joy and focusing on accomplishing things I want to do is important. Especially in contrast to a lot of traditional new year’s goals that are kind of guilt based.
I usually limit myself to 4 that I’m really commiting to for the year, so here they are for 2025!
Revisit old goals – I wanted to revisit some old goals in celebration of 10 years of fiber goals, but I couldn’t decide on which ones. So instead, I’m going to try rotating through them like I did with different crafts in 2024. Every month, I’m going to look at the goals and see if there’s one I want to revisit with one project. Since I know monthly isn’t the perfect cadence for crafts, but it *is* a good cadence for reflection, some of them may take several months, and some months I may not bother, but the goal is to at least look at the list monthly and make a choice.
Try Something New – to go with revisiting old goals, I’d also like to try some new things, but maybe smaller stuff spread out over the year rather than one big thing. As such, I think I’ll focus on techniques I haven’t tried rather than full new crafts: for knitting that might be entrelac, mitred squares, planned pooling, stacked stitches. For fountain pens it might be painting with fountain pen inks, new drawing techniques, mixing inks. Or maybe I’ll try making some things I haven’t made before, like felted slippers or a blanket. I think I’ll try to put something old/something new together in my monthly planning so I think about it regularly but I’m going to be flexible about having things take variable lengths of time.
Something stash something – I think I’m going to run a craft stash focused challenge thing mostly for myself but also invite folks on Mastodon to join me. I’m not sure what it’ll look like yet but planning is part of the goal!
Game design – I haven’t been a game designer in a long time (did you know I used to teach game design?) but I accidentally got my kid excited about one of my old ideas so I’m making this a goal in hopes we build something together, even if it’s not that particular game. This isn’t very fiber-y but maybe we’ll find a way to make that part of it?
Many years I’ve also included a bunch of brainstorming ideas here that didn’t make the cut, but I didn’t make a list of those this year.
I already did a mid-year 2024 writeup so I’m just going to talk about the second half of the year here.
Gift yarn
I finished the lighthouse shawl:
Image Description: Terri, a mixed race woman, is standing near the edge of a parking lot outside. She has a Flo Mask around her neck over top of a hand knitted lace scarf, is wearing glasses, and is holding a black choir music folder.
And I started in on a pair of socks with a funny colourway called “Introverts Unite” that apparently I haven’t photographed yet. And I’m still working on the weaving.
So nothing spectacular in the second half of the year, but that’s expected because I wanted to do Finish or Frog Along and the fall gnome and then start in on Christmas socks for my Mom then the winter gnome. Maybe I should knit fewer gnomes? (That may be a problem as there’s going to be a lot of them next year.) The obvious solution would be to knit gnomes with gift yarn, but most of it is too variegated for that so no luck. If anyone wants to buy me yarn, apparently I need more 20g fingering weight minis in solid colours!
Overall, I think I got what I wanted out of this goal, but I do want to keep pushing to use more gift yarn in 2025 because there’s certainly some left that I’m really excited to use!
Lesser Used Crafts
The full year of crafts:
January: spindle spinning
Feburary: tatting
March: mending
April: weaving
May: Origami
June Pants
July: (supported) long draw spinning
August: Embroidery
September: Writing
October: Presentations
November: Sashiko
December: Countdowns
I missed out on some that I thought I’d do like felting, crochet and quilting. But I was really excited to do a lot more writing (honestly, now I kind of want to work on writing fiction, which I haven’t done in forever) and presentations (I had two accepted talks in the fall/winter). By December I decided adding another craft on top of swatching inks for inkvent and taking pictures of my various swatches and countdown calendars was too much, so I know “countdowns” isn’t a craft but there’s a combo of swatching and photography and writing a lot of alt text, and all of those are crafts of sorts.
I think rotating through crafts was very good for me, and I’m glad to have pulled out some stuff that I hadn’t thought about when I set the goal. But I don’t think monthly was the right cadence, and I was kind of less excited about it by the end of the year especially once I wanted to focus on Finish or Frog Along, so I don’t think I’ll be doing it again in this format.
I think this might work better as a quarterly thing or if I doubled up some months and only ran it in the first half of the year. But I’m expecting to have a busy 2025 and likely will wind up packing up a lot of craft stuff to move, so I’m thinking that I may try to pull out some unfinished crafts like my weaving, doing them, then packing up the supplies as I go. Probably won’t formalize it so I can play it by ear instead.
Pants
I finished the pants back during the craft rotation in June! I’d still like to revisit and work on drafting a better pattern for my preferences/body, but this isn’t a priority for me.
Colour Play
The biggest new addition here was that I bought an “invent” countdown calendar full of ink and swatched something Dec 1-25. It was a lot of fun, and I particularly liked the “painting with fountain pen inks” which I honestly hadn’t done much before but seriously, the inks are very fun with the multi-shading and the shimmer and sheen (less so the scented ones, but thankfully I didn’t have an adverse reaction to the scent they were just less-nice as inks because they were so wet).
I tried a few things over the year: dyeing, different spinnning colour techniques, pulling out some rainbow shawls and colourwork, learning what fountain pen inks I loved, and just knitting different types of yarn. It was very fun, but I will admit that this is probably all stuff I’d have done even if I hadn’t set the goal. I like colour!
The “other” goals
I often have a list of goals that I brainstormed but didn’t decide to do. But sometimes they happen anyhow!
Blogging – I got obsessed with fountain pens and then started writing more blog posts. Now I kind of want to write some fiction too…
Ditching Instagram/Meta – this did happen, and it’s improved my life a lot to only occasionally post for a contest or something and pop in maybe once a month or so. Not constantly getting bombarded by ads has been good for my wallet, and not getting nausea from auto-playing videos is great. I’m also slowly removing old fb posts on the rare time that I log in, though it takes forever.
Classes – I did take a dye class at Craft Emporium and it was fantastic! I’d like to spend some time experimenting with the techniques we learned but I haven’t decided what to make yet.
In conclusion
I accomplished all of 2024’s Fiber goals and had a good time and learned more about what I want to do next. Stay tuned for 2025’s goals on January 1st!
This year is the 10th year I’ll be doing fiber goals, and I wanted to revisit some previous year’s goals, so I’m starting by making myself a mega post with all of them to contemplate. Fiber goals are meant to be fun things that bring me joy, and organizing them like this helps me prioritize some fun things in my life. So many new years resolutions are kind of chores or guilt-based, and I’d like to avoid that!
It’s kind of interesting to see the progression of what I’ve learned and where I put my focus over the years. Most of these goals were successful. There’s a few that I don’t need to revisit: the pants and that quilt are done and I’m not doing them again! But a lot of these could be revisited with new projects — I definitely have more gift yarn and brioche patterns and a few more “famous” patterns in my queue, plus I’ve got lots of beautiful stash that I want to use.
I still spend more time knitting than using fountain pens but you wouldn’t know it from the blog posts I write! So let’s do a bit of an update.
In September / October a group of fediverse folk do “Finish or Frog Along” (formerly Fall Finish Along, but now with a better name for people in the southern hemisphere!) and honestly, I’ve looked forwards to it since last year. I started with 5 things on my list then added 2 more as I finished things:
Clasped Weft weaving
Sweater Ornament
Pigeon Embroidery
Purple spin
Crown Wools
Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)
Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)
FinishOrFrogAlong is run by ConsumableJoy and I really appreciated the prompts that went with it for helping me think regularly about finishing and get a community doing the same. Plus it’s just really fun seeing everyone finishing things and cheering each other on. Especially since it’s a multi-craft affair so the projects are all so different!
I kind of want to have something similar for stash usage on the other side of the year and I’ve been trying to think about how to organize that. But for today’s post, let’s just talk about what I finished or didn’t finish!
Clasped Weft Weaving
Not finished.
Image Description: A weaving in progress on a rigid heddle loom. it uses two colours of variegated yarn, one grey/brown and the other blue/green. It’s a sampler showing multiple types of pattern that can be made with a pick up stick.
I was really hoping to finish this piece which I started in April during “weaving month” as I rotated through my lesser-used crafts. But while I pulled it out and got it all set up, I only actually wove less than an inch during Finish and Frog along, so rather than being the thing I finished first like I thought when I set up the list, it became the biggest “fail” on my list.
Some of this was because I didn’t really know what to do next — I’d been iterating through exercises in a book and had to return it to the library, and when I bought my own copy I realized I should have taken pictures of all my sticky note flags so I’d be able to restart easily, and instead I had to puzzle it out.
But the other thing is that my current weaving setup doesn’t fit very well into my life, so I have to be more intentional about making time for it and I can’t do it while curled up with the dog in my recliner in the evenings, and as a result it feels like a hassle. There’s some things I can do about that: I can put the loom in a better spot where I can reach it when I’m in crafting mode not during dog cuddle time, I can grab audiobooks so I can multitask, and I really need to spend some time getting a bag so it’s easier to carry the loom and the yarn and shuttles and everything all together so it’s an option when I’m feeling overstimulated and just need to hang out upstairs or downstairs on my own for a bit.
But in the end it winds up feeling much the way I feel about quilting: I don’t hate it but it doesn’t quite fit into my life and it feels like a chore. A stranger commented “to everything there is a season” on one of my griping quilting posts with the explanation that it’s perfectly reasonable to save quilting for another part of my life when I don’t have a young child and a puppy and a full time job and a pandemic. And after two months of thinking I should make time for weaving and then just not doing it, I think it’s time to accept that this is not the season of weaving in my life. And that’s ok: I don’t have to be completely obsessed with every skill I learn or thing I do.
I will note that it’s a bit strange that I don’t feel this way about spinning, which similarly is hard to do curled up in a chair with a book. But the solution with spinning has been to enjoy it during a couple of sprints rather than do it year round: I enjoy Tour De Fleece, I get in a bit more during Finish or Frog Along, and last year I also did the 100 day stashdown from Jillian Moreno’s patreon. I think I may need to find some similar sprints for weaving if I want to do it, or (as I have with quilting) let it just be a sometimes craft in my life. I was really tempted by the Sweet Georgia winter weave-a-long that is happening now, but I’d need to finish what’s on the loom now before I could start it.
I’m still *intending* to finish up what’s on the loom now, and after I spent time writing about it I finally did pick it up in the last week of November. But it’s mostly taking a back seat while I finish my holiday knitting and stuff so I don’t know that I’ll finish it in time to really join the weave-a-long or if I should take the opportunity to pack up the loom in preparation for moving next year.
So, total fail on *finishing* this project, but it forced a lot of good introspection about whether this craft was suiting me and how to make it work better in my life.
Sweater Ornament
Finished!
Image Description: A small embroidery kit including a nice round yarn holder, a piece of felt pre-printed with an embroidery pattern (a sweater with a sheep and yarn on it) and a small bag with a camping motf.
This is from cute Christmas ornament kit that I bought last year. I finished one then, one this year, and maybe I’ll do the last next year. I remembered to put the year on this time!
Image Description: A small Christmas ornament style embroidered felt sweater with the year stitched on the back.
I have to say, I really loved these kits: Knitted Bliss really puts together a nice set with the nicer thread holders, a magnetic needle keeper, needle threader, and everything for the 3 ornaments. This may be the nicest embroidery kit I’ve ever had, with a lot of thought put into how it would be used so the whole experience is just really lovely. (No thin paper to hold thread! Everything well labelled, and big photos to go with the instructions.) I highly recommend this kit and will probably get more from her when I’ve got space for more embroidery stuff.
Image Description: My finished embroidered sweater ornament viewed from the front. It has a yarn bowl with a sheep on it filled with yarn on the front of a white (felt) sweater with pink ribbing at neck/sleeves/hem. There is a small clothes hanger stuck in between the two halves of the ornament that were sewn together, so the hanger can be hung on a Christmas tree or otherwise displayed.
Pigeon Embroidery
Not finished, but that’s the expected result.
Image Description: Pigeon embroidery in a hoop. The chest feathers have been mostly finished but the rest isn’t done yet. There is a bee & honeycomb magnetic needle minder attached to the hoop near the pigeon’s head.
I mostly wanted to put this one into the finishing rotation to avoid hand strain without feeling like I should be working on something on the list. Embroidery fills a weird niche in my crafting repertoire as a hand break because it uses my muscles differently yet keeps my hands busy so I don’t wind up with repetitive strain, so I usually have one on the go with no particular deadline for finishing. I usually finish one or two of these per year unless I’m feeling particularly excited about one or doing something very small.
Purple spin
Finished!
Image Description: Long draw spinning in progress: my wooden spinning wheel set up with some hanks of fiber sitting on top as a prepare to spin.
This was another long draw spin from Tour de France Femmes this summer. I’m really enamoured of long draw and am starting to feel actually proficient. I wanted to do a 3 ply since I have the EEW lazy kates and could do it more easily, and I intentionally chose to let the colours mix in plying. It looks nice, but I think I like more of a gradient than a blend so I’ll probably plan differently next 3-ply. Still, I’m looking forwards to knitting with this and maybe I’ll like it more once it’s knit up!
Image Description: Plying setup on an EEW Lazy Kate: three plies of purple singles waiting to be plied.Image Description: Purple 3-ply spin all done and twisted into a pretty yarn skein. There are multiple shades of purple all mixed.
Crown Wools
Finished!
Image Description: Crown Wools wrap: a rainbow wrap made with 12 different colours of yarn and 12 different textures. It’s a large bias-knit parallelogram but has been curled into something more like a circle for the photo.
This was my year-long project, slightly condensed so that it would finish in September for the event. I loved doing this and have it displayed in my office, but I do need to acknowledge that while I love the curated sets of rainbow minis that come with these sorts of things, they’re pretty much my least frequently worn items because they’re just a bit too big to be practical for the way I move and do stuff.
I’ve picked out a blanket and some rainbow stash yarn for next year’s ongoing project (it may take more than a year, I’m not sure yet). I may also consider some complicated colourwork sweater stuff for future ongoing project planning if I can figure out a nice way to divide that up over a few months. Inches per body or maybe something with colourwork that I can split up?
Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)
Knitting still in progress, but charts are finished!
Image Description: My design for a rainbow wrap in progress, showing colours going from red to blue. I had made a mistake on one side (you can see a bulge marked by a lollipop stitch marker where the problem occurred) and had to rip back two sections so I wouldn’t run out of yarn.
After I finished 2 things on my initial list of 5 I added a few extras and this is one of them! This was a personal design project that I started before my local yarn shop went online-only, before the pandemic. I feel like I was an entirely different person. But I’d taken enough notes and had the physical object, so I fixed up the charts and knit a bunch more repeats. I’ve got a few colours left but i decided to do a Clapotis for Knitty’s Clapotisfest and I want to make winter socks for my mom before shipping gets overloaded in December, so I’ll finish this later. I’m really happy with it and would like to actually make a good free pattern out of it eventually but I have to at least finish the knitting to take pictures before I get to that point!
Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)
Frogged!
Image Description: The scarf pre-frogging, showing that I only barely finished one motif and it didn’t look like much. Although the photo makes the contrast look ok, it was veyr hard to see in real life.
This was a neat knitting RPG concept where you rolled dice and got different charts to go with the story, but I chose yarns that weren’t working for me and I wasn’t having a good time so I bailed on the MKAL. I usually frog stuff right away but for a variety of reasons I didn’t do it right then.
Image Description: The yarn just after frogging (ripping out). It looks a lot like dried ramen noodles, all wavy.
So many years later, I had to frog and steam the yarn so it’s ready for re-use. Though I’m not sure what I’d use it in since I’d bought the yarns to be used together then didn’t like them for colourwork. Maybe some brioche instead? Problem for future me.
Image Description: The frogged yarn sitting on my ironing board with a clothes steamer, used to steam the yarn and straighten it out so it can be more easily re-used.
In conclusion…
One frogged, 3 finished, 3 still going (although one of those at least had charts finished, so that should probably count!). I had a great time finishing and frogging this year and I like that this is becoming enough part of fediverse crafting culture that I wasn’t the only one looking forwards to it.
I’ve started following more pen/planner blogs and a few of them mentioned the concept of “Techo Kaigi” which apparently translates roughly to “Planner meeting” and the idea seems to be that you take some time to evaluate how a system is working for you. I’ve seen people doing it more as an annual review, but since I’m using small notebooks and mine’s 2/3 done I think now’s as good a time as any to reflect on how the “new” setup is working for me.
Image description: All the things in my journal/planner set up laid out: two pouches, a Travler’s notebook calendar with a zipper pouch attached to the back, a pencil + lead + eraser, a blue A5 notebook, and 6 fountain pens.
Current setup:
A5 dot journal (nominally a bullet journal but at this point I’m mostly using my own personal system)
Monthly calendar Traveler’s Notebook standard size (A5 slim)
Traveler’s Notebook zipper pocket for storing stickers (attached to calendar)
Fabric Zipper pouches: one for notebooks, one for pens
~6 fountain pens
Pencil with my name lasered onto the side, eraser (in a penguin-shaped case) and a box of pencil lead
The Traveler’s Notebook calendar turned out to be a great choice, and despite my worries it seems to be (just barely) big enough for me. I really love it with the zipper pouch attached for sticker management. I was worried that the thinner paper might bug me, but it’s working ok with the pencil I use since I tend to move things on the calendar sometimes. I’m getting into the habit of using washi since a lot of my stickers are too big to really fit in there. I suspect the calendar is going to really shine as I start to swap the bullet journal notebooks out more quickly for the next while. But it’s already been handy for an overview of school and kid related stuff!
Image Description: The inside of my calendar notebook, showing a few upcoming days and some cute hedgehog stickers I got at Powell’s.
I’ve been using my remaining monthly calendar stickers to make smaller spreads in the bullet journal because they’re too big for the Traveler’s notebook. But I don’t really *need* those calendar spreads in two places and I don’t want to keep more than one paper calendar updated. I’m debating some sort of art page as a month section break, or maybe this is time for some of my bigger stickers to shine?
Thinner A5 Journal
The smaller size of my new tiny softcover sewn-spine Rhodia notebook has meant that I carry the journal around a lot more than my old corgi journal. It lives in my knitting bag and even came on my last trip. So the smaller size has worked exactly as I hoped: big success!
But it’s maybe a bit more of a success than I was planned for: between the fact that the book is always close at hand *and* my new collection of fountain pens that makes it more fun to write, I’m filling this up faster than I realized I would. The notebook is only going to last 2 months instead of the 5 I estimated when I bought it many months ago before finishing my old journal. And that’s even though I moved a lot of tracking into the calendar notebook! If I add in stuff like a daily drawing challenge I’m quickly going to wind up with 1 notebook per month.
Image Description: A stack of notebooks in different thicknesses. On the bottom is my original corgi journal that lasted two years which is the thickest of the 4 notebooks. Above that is my current 2-month journal which is the thinnest. On top are two more notebooks both about twice as thick as my current book. The red one says “Clairfontaine” on the spine and the teal one says “Rhodia”
I don’t know if that bothers me that the notebooks won’t last too long. I like the convenience of the lighter weight little notebooks, and I’m not too sad to have an excuse to switch notebooks multiple times a year and get that “fresh start” feeling. I guess it’s more expensive, but not enough to be a problem for me.
I’ve already picked up a few similarly sized notebooks, and also a few that are around double the thickness. (Thank you sales; you can see a few of the thicker ones in the picture above.) It might be logical to swap between thin and thick so I never wind up carrying two thick ones, but I think given the success of this notebook, I’m going to plan for another thin one next and see how the switchover goes.
I picked up one of those Iroful books that have paper designed to show off fancy ink and I think it might be fun to use that one next in conjunction with the Diamine Inkvent calendar since I’ll be using new inks every day for most of the month. But I’m going to swatch some of my current pens in there first to see how the whole thing feels before I decide for sure. I did decide that I’m going to start swatching pens in the *back* of notebooks because then there’s space to grow.
Inks
I did have my first pen + ink + paper combo complete fail with Octopus Sheening in Fairy. It worked beautifully in my dip pen on the sheets I bought for doing swatches (A white Rhodia pad), but was a disaster in my TWSBI Eco on the Rhodia ivory paper and it bled through everything. It was even worse in Tomoe River S notebook I sometimes use for pen testing and scribbles when I don’t want to break up a journal entry. (It was nice on my old journal with the 120gsm paper, but that’s not very helpful since there are no blank pages left in there!) I wound up clearing out the Eco and put a tiny amount in a Platinum Preppy and the fine nib has made the Fairy usable, but I’m not really getting sheen. Thankfully it’s a really nice colour so I’m happy to use what little is in there, but I’ll probably try it again when I switch paper.
Image Description: A pair of images side-by-side showing the front and back of a page in a Tomoe River S notebook. At the top you can see a bunch of scribbles in Wearingeul 1984 in a Nahvalur Original Plus, including some thick blobs. On the bottom is some Octopus Fairy ink also with some blobs and writing. On the reverse side of the page, you can see that the 1984 does not show through although it has made some wet waves on the page, but the Fairy has bled right through the paper in a lot of places.
Overall, I’ve learned that while I’m usually team sparkle, the shimmer inks tend to either unpleasant to use (my Robert Oster Rose Gold Antiqua sample *squeaked* on paper in my Eco and caused a lot of hand strain) or underwhelming with only occasional peeks of shimmer in the first few lines (such as Robert Oster Emerald of Chivor, which was also at the edge of bleedthrough sometimes, and Ferris Wheel Press Crystal Blue Legacy which is 90% boring with occasional spectacular blue). I did like the Wearingeul Frankenstein and 1984 even without much luck on the shimmer actually showing on the page, at least. I’m slowly learning which pens go best with which inks and how carefully and slowly I have to write for shimmer inks to get the best effect, but it’s a slow learning process. I don’t think I’m ready to give up on shimmer inks entirely, but I think the annoying factor is going to change how I plan to use shimmer inks — more ornamentation, less journalling, and maybe not too many inked at a time.
I’m not too worried about having a few lousy ink experiences, though. That’s the point of trying samples! But also, most of these aren’t going on my list of full-sized bottles to buy.
One sparkle success story, though: I tried the Diamine Red Lustre that I hated in my Metropolitan again in November, this time in the TWSBI Swipe. I did have to dilute the ink a bit and I still don’t think it’s a nice journalling pen, but it’s been fun for section headers and drawings.
Image Description: A drawing of a cartoon polar bear holding a heart. All the inks used have shimmer, but the gold shimmer on the red heart stands out particularly well.
And I have been enjoying a lot of inks, though! I finally swatched all my samples (maybe more on that in a future post) and I’m down to only 6 that haven’t made it into my journal rotation. At this point those will likely wait until January or later, since I’m going to be playing with inkvent inks in December.
Stickers
I picked up a Halloween countdown from Stickii and have been having a lot of fun using those stickers! I also dug out some other stickers I had around and have been using them in the journal. I do think it means I tend not to draw as much on my own when I have art to just paste in, but the stickers delight me regularly and it’s nice to have art *especially* when I’ve been making my hands sore from ink experiments and I wasn’t going to doodle with a pen/ink combo that’s making me cranky. Plus, it’s nice to have a relatively inexpensive way to support artists without winding up with piles of prints building up in my house. I have a substantial box of prints I don’t even have space to display, so it’s nice to use up sticker sheets every few weeks.
I’m debating getting a regular sticker subscription from stickii for my birthday, but I might wait until spring since I’ve got their advent binder to open in December and I’m definitely not going to finish all of that in one month!
Image Description: Zipper pouch attached to to traveler’s notebook calendar. This shows the front of the calendar with the zipper pouch sticking out to one side. There’s a sticker from BSides PDX featuring a sasquatch holding a jack-o-lantern, and stamp-shaped one from Oblation Press with a dog in fall scene on it in the zippered pouch. On the front cover of the calendar there is a big round shiny sticker with an aurora over mountains, and a smaller sticker with a orange hat wearing a witch’s hat that reads “today is a good day to get cozy”
Sticker storage was a bit of an issue because sometimes they got a bit rumpled from me pulling the other notebooks in and out of my pouch, but I got a Traveler’s notebook add-on that I’ve slipped over the back cover of the notebook that gives me a couple of pockets that are the right size for the sheets I have from a few different people.
Image Description: View of zipper pouch attachment on back of my notebook, flipped “open” so you can see that some loose stickers are in the pouch and sheets are held in a pocket against the back cover.
Pens
I now officially have “enough” pens for my usual needs: I wanted 4-6 for journalling, 2 for my backpack, and I added a couple to my desk for work todo lists. I used to do the work todo stuff digitally but it wasn’t working well so I decided to go analog to help myself break out of a rut. So far it’s helping!
From starting in May with my 1 wood pen, I’ve acquired about 2 more per month so I’ve amassed more than a dozen pens. Most of these are under $30 (often a lot less) so they’re in that “I don’t really have to think too hard about this purchase” level of things for me. I’ve tried to focus on trying different brands and different nibs and making sure I think about the ergonomics and use them a fair bit before letting my feelings about them really gel.
Thoughts on nibs:
Not a fan of Fine or Extra Fine for long-form writing, but being able to use them on cheap old notebooks is kind of great so they’re still useful to me.
Medium is convenient for maintaining some form of legibility when I want to write a little faster. It’s often my go-to on nights where I only have maybe 5-10 minutes to journal and don’t want to think about how I write.
I don’t own any Broad or extra/double broads myself, but I tried a few in store and decided they weren’t as much fun as stub nibs or as convenient as mediums. Maybe I’ll get some and change my mind eventually but it didn’t seem worth prioritizing.
I’m still loving stub nibs: the line variation is fun, they force me to write big, and as long as I’m a bit careful about my in choices of ink and how I write they can be pretty smooth.
I only just got a flex nib and have written with it twice, but it seems nice? I think the pen is too heavy for me though.
I really liked the fude nib on my dip pen, so I may have to invest in a regular pen that has one.
Thoughts on pen aesthetics:
Other people seem to care a lot about clips but I don’t think I’d miss them with my current setup. In fact I think the clips might be what scratched up one of my smaller plastic pens!
I do love sparkle on the outside even if I have mixed feelings about it on the inside.
I really like having at least a small window to view ink. (Especially the sparkly inks!)
I can handle much heavier pens than I might have guessed. Only one of my pens seems to be too heavy for longer use and I was well-warned about it (but decided to try it anyhow because it was on sale).
I do like the light weight ones, though! I was worried because I saw people talking about pens feeling “cheap” but so far only one of my plastic pens feels not great to me and it’s far from the cheapest of the lot.
Thoughts on filling mechanisms:
I often switch ink at the end of the month before pens would naturally run out of ink, so huge reservoirs aren’t super important to me right now. They might matter more when I’m not operating mostly off samples, but I suspect not because picking palettes for each month is something I really enjoy *and* because it’s good to be in a habit of cleaning the pens monthly.
It’s really convenient to use a syringe + converter to use the last of any sample vial rather than tryign to use a piston pen.
The converter pens are also pretty fast to clean compared to the piston ones. But my kid enjoyed cleaning my piston pen anyhow.
I haven’t tried to clean my one vacuum pen so no thoughts there yet. I’m intending to run it right out of ink which may take a while even though I tried not to fill it too much.
It takes me forever to empty a cartridge (in part because they’re such boring colours) so I haven’t tried refilling those yet.
I think it’s safe to say that I have an actual *collection* of fountain pens now. It’s not just the 6 you see but the other 8? or so scattered around my house. Maybe I could have saved some money by testing more pens in store, but I wouldn’t feel as confident about my choices if I hadn’t forced myself to use each pen in rotation for a month before moving on. And tester pens don’t tell you much about filling mechanisms, which I wanted to learn too. I’ve covered a lot of the things I wanted to try and I’ll probably give away a few of the pens that don’t suit me well as I replace them with ones that suit me better. I do think I’ll buy more pens: they’re smaller than yarn! But I think have a reasonable variety now and that’ll be perfect for experimenting with inks in December. And maybe I’m at the tipping point where I’m ready to be more picky about my choices which may help me resist overdoing it in the sales to come! (Well, one can hope.)
Bags
I remain a ridiculous Tom Bihn devotee and like being able to clip this whole thing into my knitting bag for easy retrieval. I spent a lot of time looking at notebook covers seeing if I could find something I’d like better than the A5 pouch and so far the answer is no. This cover has protected my setup really well and I’m really happy with how it worked out.
The small pouch works well as a pencil case, but I did notice that one of my smaller pens did get a tiny bit scratched up and the position of the scratch makes me think that it came from another pen’s clip. It’s not a big deal, but I will probably use this as an excuse to shop for pretty fountain-pen padded cases (or make my own). For now the one pen that’s prone to scratching has been moved to another pocket of my knitting bag but I may make a tiny sleeve for it so I don’t take up brain space thinking about it.
I am debating adding a second small pouch so I can have scissors and washi tape on hand too, but sometimes the washi tape gets kind of banged up if I carry it around. Since I usually only want those things at the beginning of the month when I’m setting stuff up, it’s just as well to have them live elsewhere in the house, but maybe I’ll find a tin of the right size in my knitting stash to solve the problem.
Overall
The pouches + notebooks + pens setup is working better for me than the larger planner in an organizer bag was. The new pouch comes around the house with my knitting, it’s easy to grab and throw into my suitcase, or even just to take out and put on my lap so I have my usual tools at hand. I did have to add some sticker storage but otherwise it’s pretty much as I’d planned before I started using it.
We’ll be testing how I handle more rapid journal swaps sooner than I expected, but I’m excited to try more paper and the calendar should help with continuity, so hopefully that’ll be fun instead of annoying.
I’m really delighted with having such a tangible way to show how fountain pens are changing my habits in an enjoyable way. So much more writing and a bit more drawing! And I’m also happy to be having fun with stickers, which I’ve always enjoyed but there’s only so much room on my laptop and the like. It’s funny to think that when I started journaling, I was thinking a lot about doing a gratitude journal because my grandmother had been keeping one to help with her mental health. But even when I wind up using the journal to grump about work or whatever, I’m getting a lot of joy from the process of picking up a pen and making the ink flow. It’s been a grumpy couple of months and I’m glad to lean in to stuff that’s fun and low-key creative.
It’s a fountain pen shaped like a shark! It’s made by Jinhao, who are known for making cheap but often decent fountain pens. It sounds like not all of their pens are winners because quality control isn’t great but if you’re willing to roll the dice and don’t mind that the design may be a total knockoff, sometimes you get a pretty decent pen at a discount price.
Image description: A shark-inspired fountain pen sits on my desk with two kitty pencil sharpeners. The shark pen has a shark shaped head with eyes, gills and a small dorsal fin. There is no tail on the other end of the pen; it tapers to a slightly smaller cylinder. The pen is made of a silvery blue/grey plastic with a clear section in the middle so you can see the ink. This section is a bit thinner than the rest of the pen and has some dents to support a triangular grip.
My shark pen cost $4 and was an impulse add to hit free shipping or something, but you can get them considerably cheaper from Ali Express or Amazon — search for Jinhao 993 or Jinhao shark pen. If you buy a pack of them I think they’re less than $2 each, which is pretty sweet for a pen with an included converter. It’s a bit longer than most of my other pens. Here’s a photo showing it with the Platinum Preppy and Pilot Varsity, both similar pens appreciated for their cheap prices.
Image Description: Jinhao Shark Pen, Platinum Preppy Wa, and Pilot Varsity. The shark pen is longer than the Preppy which is in turn longer than the Varsity.
I’m impressed at how nicely it writes. It’s got a very fine tip, so it’s not ergonomically great for *me* but as long as I’m not writing pages of stuff it’s pretty decent for notes and todo lists, and still a bit easier on my hands than a ballpoint. It’s thin enough that it works nicely without show-through on my thin-paged calendar and on cheaper notebooks without fancy paper. Well, it doesn’t show through in normal use: my kid definitely managed to get it to bleed, but that was very intentional on his part as he was exploring how the pen worked.
Image Description: Shark pen sitting on my Field Notes (larger size) notebook that I carry around. It has been filled with kid doodles while my kid was playing with the pen, including a stick dog which has been labelled “dog” a butteryfly, a rainbow, a happy face and more. Most has been drawn with the shark pen although he’s added some accents in purple (using my Pilot Kakuno)
I bought it with the intention of it being a fun pen to have in my backpack for kid entertainment, and I particularly appreciate that it’s got a bit of plastic covering most of the nib, which makes it considerably less messy to hand to my child. (I’m not sure all versions of the pen have this, but mine does.).
Image Description: Shark pen unchapped on my book. You can see that there is a black “hood” over the fountain pen nib. It is sitting on a notebook where you can see that my kid was delighted to discover that if he held the pen at the right angle he could get the ink to bleed through. Hands on learning!
It is worth $4 for me but I’m mildly regretting not shopping around and getting a set instead, especially since there’s a good chance my one pen will wind up meeting an ignoble end while providing child entertainment. Oh well, maybe I’ll get a set next time if that happens!
Image Description: Jinhao Shark Pen in blue/grey. It’s a pen with a shark head shaped cap.
I had a little bit of solo time on my way home from BSidesPDX in October, so I stopped by Oblation Papers. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever visited before — maybe once when I was visiting before we moved to the area? Anyhow, it’s very pretty:
Image Description: The inside of Oblation Papers, a stationary shop in Portland. There are calendars and notecards arranged on a table in front, a mobile made of white paper flowers (?) hanging from the ceiling, an ink bar barely visible on the right, and more products including wrapping paper visible in the room beyond.
I mostly went to look around, but I did have one intended purchase: I wanted to take a look at the Traveler’s Notebook line they had to see if I could find a nice way to hold my Stickii sticker sheets with one of their folder-y things. It was really nice to see the options in person. I decided to grab the zippered pouch and after a bit of experimentation have hooked it over the back cover of my calendar and stuffed the stickers inside like so:
Image description: A Traveler’s Notebook regular size monthly planner with a “zipper pouch” slipped over the back cover and stickers slipped inside. The zipper pouch itself is empty but has a large knitting/crochet “progress keeper” shaped like a lollipop sitting on it to hold it open for a picture. There is a sticker sheet with magical cats and fountain pens (designed by Yudoart) sitting on the top of the small stack of stickers stuffed into the pocket.
I’m glad to report that it fits both the stickii halloween stickers I got and just barely fits the pipsticks ones I use for some tracking since the sheet they’re on is a bit wider. The new A5 bullet journal I switched to in October doesn’t have a pocket, so this is my new solution! I actually like it better than the pocket of my old journal because the stickers are visible which helps me remember to use them and also adds some fun to the back of my calendar without me having to commit to seeing the same stickers all year. Although I did finally choose a couple for the front!
Image Description: A beige traveler’s notebook monthly planner in the regular size. You can see the zippered edge of the pouch sticking out on one side. On the front there are two stickers: a sleepy orange cat with a witch’s hat that reads “today is a good day for getting cozy” (from The Latest Kate) and a large circular sticker with mountains, stars, a moon, and a purple to blue aurora that practically glows due to the reflective nature of the sticker. It’s even prettier in person, and was made by Tonkai / Fireside Textiles.
I did debate getting an actual Traveler’s Notebook leather cover to go with my calendar and took some time to feel the ones they had on display and think about it. I *think* they’re a bit too heavy and thick for what I want at the moment. I love the idea so much that I might try it someday anyhow, but I have to be fairly careful about adding too much weight to what I carry on the regular, so I settled for the cover and a shop souvenir sticker instead.
I also took some time to try out some oft-recommended beginner pens that were on my potential to-buy list as well as whatever else they had out. It turns out that I don’t actually love the feel of the Lamy Safaris, which isn’t too disheartening since I also don’t love most of their designs. Plus, some weeks after the day I was shopping they went and announced their new pens in partnership with the transphobe fantasy marketing machine (aka, HP) so I’m not feeling bad about taking them off the shopping list.
I had more luck with the Kaweco Sport: I do indeed like the feel of the pen, and after experimenting with the testers they had out, I’ve decided that double broad and broad are probably a bit too much for me, especially if I wanted to use it as a pocket pen. I don’t know that it’ll replace my space pen, but it seems like a viable contender. I wasn’t up for paying full retail the day I tried them but I did keep an eye out and later snagged one during the Fountain Pen Day sales so I might have more to say about that after it gets here. I did try a few other pens but none of them stood out enough to buy one.
Image Description: Another view inside Oblation Papers, this time showing a different table with 2025 calendars and a large display of cards near the front windows.
I did debate getting a bottle of one of their 4 shop-exclusive inks, but it was pretty busy that evening so I talked myself out of getting someone to get a bottle for me while I was waiting to check out. I feel like I have very little ink left because my sample vials are mostly empty, but I’ve bought a Diamine inkvent calendar so I’m going to have more than I can use next month.
Oblation papers was a lovely place to visit. Unfortunately, it’s more than an hour on the train and their prices and shipping are more expensive than some of the places I shop online, so I don’t think I’m going to suddenly become a regular customer even though it’s “local” to me. I do think being able to look through their ink swatch book in person might be handy for some ink purchases, but a few dollars for an ink sample seems like something I’m much more likely to do than a 3hr shopping trip. But I could see myself going down for an event or stopping by on those rare occasions where I’m down near the Pearl on my own!
If you just want the answer to “where do I find a reliable global mirror of NVD vulnerability data?” or “Where should I get a list of CVEs if NVD is down?” the answer is https://cveb.in/ . It is being mirrored on the same servers used for major open source projects so you’re probably already trusting them, and they should be fast and may be very close to you. Please go ahead and use it and let us know how it works for you!
I co-presentented a talk about this work at BSidesPDX on Saturday, October 26, 2024:
Often when I write about talks I’ve given, I try to kind of recreate them in blog posts to be a bit of a director’s cut were I add in a bit of extra material that didn’t make the talk but they’re pretty similar to what I said on stage. This time, though, since I didn’t give the second half of the talk and John and I have very different ways of telling a story, I’m just gonna tell a story in this blog post and maybe toss in a few slides. If you want to watch us both tell the story from our own perspectives, check out the video. Although we collaborate on a lot of stuff it’s surprisingly rare for us to share a stage.
Still here and not going with the recording? Okay, let me tell you a story…
The US government DDOSed itself
Once upon a time, not so long ago, the US government decided it wanted to raise the bar for software security in their supply chain, and they wrote up an executive order on cybersecurity explaining how they wanted suppliers to do better, including a section on not shipping software with known vulnerabilities. Many other groups followed suit with similar recommendations or requirements.
As a result, a lot of organizations’ security plans started to look a lot like this:
Image Description: A diagram from my talk about NVD mirroring. The top of the slide is labelled “2024 Corporate Security Policy_final_FINAL.doc” (which is a joke about filenames for things that undergo a lot of revisions). There are then three columns. The first is labelled Step 1 and there is text in a red box that reads “Scan components for vulnerabilities.” Step 2 has an orange box which contains the text, “???” and Step 3 has two green boxes, one of which says “EVERYTHING IS SECURE” and has a picture of a closed lock. The second reads, “$$ Profit $$”
There is a lot to say about steps 2 and 3 here, but our problem starts at the beginning of Step 1. To scan for vulnerabilities, you need a list of software you’re providing (which is a whole talk in and of itself) and a list of known software vulnerabilities.
One of the biggest sources of vulnerability data actually comes from the US government: the NVD (National Vulnerability Database) provided by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It’s pretty great — they provide it fully free, publicly licensed. This is usually where you go to get information about CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures).
But what do you think happens if every single US government supplier and indeed, many other software companies around the world, all try to grab this data at once? And more than that, many of them start enabling regular scanning so they’re grabbing it multiple times per day, or per hour?
Image Description: A slide from my BSidesPDX 2024 talk which reads “Distributed Denial of Service” and has photo I took of some street signs near the train tracks. The relevant one is a large yellow caution sign that shows a person with a bike getting a wheel stuck in the train tracks and the rider is being launched off the bike over the tracks.
So, yeah, the US government kind of started a denial of service attack against its own agency. And in case that wasn’t bad enough, we started seeing headlines like “NIST Struggles with NVD Backlog as 93% of Flaws Remain Unanalyzed ” where the stories talked about funding cuts at NIST.
The fine folk at NIST have been doing a hard job with not enough resources and some really unfortunate timing, so they’d already been working on keeping things from being overwhelmed. They had introduced rate limits per IP address/API key to keep rogue scanning jobs from ruining things for everyone, and they had started providing an API that allowed people to get just the newest data instead of having to download things every time. Unfortunately, the API combined with rate limits was pretty slow so getting the full database the first time using the API was onerous when it worked at all. Several of my colleagues in the UK and in India had such long delays that they had to give up and bootstrap the “old” way to get started. And a lot of people were running their scanning within ephemeral containers and just didn’t cache the copy of the database at all so they wanted to get all the data fresh with each new scan. When neither the rate limits nor the API was enough to address demand longer-term, and with budget cuts on the horizon, NIST turned to looking for industry partnerships and additional funding.
It was clear that this wasn’t a problem that was getting solved quickly.
That sounds bad, but how is that YOUR problem, Terri?
Why did I care? I mean, obviously I’m a security professional and things that stand in the way of good security choices are a problem for me in general. But in this case, my work open source project involves building a vulnerability scanner called cve-bin-tool: https://pypi.org/project/cve-bin-tool . It’s a free, open source software vulnerability scanner for binary files, git repos, and SBOMs.
(Quick reminder: This is my personal blog and as such, all opinions here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.)
In the course of developing software to scan for vulnerabilities, we’d gotten a front row seat to all of the NVD changes: we’d had to start using API Keys and explaining them to our users, we’d had to handle new timeout messages and do appropriate backoffs and rate limits, and we’d started getting reports from users that updates were slow or not working. Many users and contributors located outside of the US were experiencing extensive delays.
Following NVD best practice had been making our code more complex, our software harder to use, and our users unhappy. It’s hard enough to get software developers to care about vulnerabilities, and it was getting uncomfortably hard to do something that had previously been pretty easy to install and try. But while we supported other data sources with vulnerability data, NVD was still the biggest one and the one people wanted the most.
How do we make vulnerability data available to everyone?
We probably could have solved the problem for cve-bin-tool similar to how commercial entities have handled it: make our own copy, query that, keep it updated separately. They often add proprietary data (such as the missing triage of new vulnerabilities) and then sell access to that data as part of their solution. We were already keeping a local copy of the data in github so our CI jobs would quit timing out at inopportune moments. But my goal has long been to make software more secure for everyone. What if we thought bigger than one python application? What if I built a solution that would help the whole world?
Image description: A slide from my BSidesPDX 2024 talk. On one side, it reads “what if we helped the *world* get vulnerability data?” and on the other side it has a screenshot of a tumblr post. The first post is from writing-prompt-s and reads “In a game with no consequences, why are you still playing the ‘Good’ side?”. The next post is from raphaeliscoolbutrude and says “Because being mean makes me feel bad.” The final post is from user deflare and reads, “Because my no-consequences power fantasy is *being able to help everyone*”
It might have been easy to lay a lot of the blame on people using “ephemeral” continuous integration jobs. They typically grab a mostly empty linux image, install/update some software, download the thing they want to scan, download the vulnerability data, store a report somewhere, then throw the rest of the thing away to start fresh next time. If they just cached the data instead of grabbing it every single time, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
But we could learn from what they were doing too: it was perfectly viable for them to download entire software binaries every single time, and no one batted an eye at that. Why was it easier and faster to get the software than to get meta data about the software? The answer, of course, is that we weren’t all trying to download from a single underfunded government agency. But instead we were downloading from… a bunch of underfunded open source hippies? How was that working but the government servers weren’t?
I am old enough that I knew the answer. Open source had solved their distribution problem by asking people to store a “mirror” (a copy of all the files) on their own servers, then building infrastructure to help people find the one closest to them. It all happened long before anyone had coined the term “cloud service provider” and it had happened on shoestring budgets with people donating a bit of space in a server rack and a bit of bandwidth. A lot of early mirrors were in universities or small internet service providers who had an open source enthusiast on staff. Get enough of them, and suddenly everyone gets software and no one gets stuck with a giant bill or an overloaded server.
It looked like neither government nor industry was going to solve this problem on the timeline I wanted and maybe never on the global scale that would make my life easier. But I have access to resources that a government agency maybe doesn’t: I know where one of the world’s leading experts on open source mirroring lives. It’s in my house. Because I married him. As well as having years of experience in multiple roles, he’s actively involved in running one of the larger open source content distribution networks in the world. So I had access to exactly what I needed to help everyone. I walked upstairs and said, “Hey John, if I wanted to mirror the NVD data on the micro mirrors, could we do that?” and then we figured out how to make it happen.
FCIX Micro Mirrors
This is the point at which I handed the talk over to John. But here’s my truncated version of his half of the story.
John builds infrastructure the way I knit: compulsively and constantly. And when he’s not actually doing something with his infrastructure there’s a good chance he’s thinking about it or talking about it. He hosts people’s websites and emails and mastodon accounts, he accidentally got involved in founding a whole internet exchange, and he’s forever automating and building backends for things in the house that I really wish weren’t internet-enabled. (Look, I’m a security professional, I’m allergic to too much internet.)
One day his friend Kenneth decided it would be fun to run a software mirror for their internet exchange, and he roped John into it, and then into this hare brained idea of maybe running a lot of mirrors on cheap hardware. John had previously run kernel.org and the associated linux mirrors there, and he had done so on big beefy servers with big beefy bandwidth, so he was skeptical that this would work. Still, not only was it cheap to try and see, but thanks to some donations they didn’t even have to lay out much of their own money to get it going. And long story short: it turns out it works incredibly well.
The deal is that they build up these cheap “thin client” boxes with a hard drive in them that have a copy of the data and are managed remotely by John and Kenneth. Then they offer them up to free to data centres who are willing to provide power and internet. It’s kind of a fully managed appliance, so the data centre gets blazing fast downloads of open source software for their customers and anyone else “nearby” and Kenneth and John get a dot on their map and the knowledge that they’re helping distribute open source software. (Also they get to run globally load bearing infrastructure for funsies. Which it really is for them.)
Here’s my favourite picture: since one of our contributors is based in the UK, we turned on the UK-based mirrors first, and one of them is a data center in a box in a field:
Image Description: A dark green utility box sitting in a beautiful field with yellow summer grass, green bushes, and green trees along the edges. There is a wedge of blue sky with clouds visible. One of the software mirrors is inside the green box.
What’s been amazing is that this little network of devices is now a major powerhouse of linux mirroring. They estimate that they’re providing 90% of the bandwidth used for VLC, so if you’ve downloaded that or anything else they serve, there’s a good chance you’ve already used one of these mirrors and not known it. https://mirror.fcix.net/ if you want to see the list of projects. Kenneth is giving a talk at SeaGL in November if you want to hear more about the micro mirror story.
Serving the right data: files are better than APIs
The key to using these tiny servers is basically “linux people optimized sending files in order to make mirrors work.” And they did that quite a while ago so it’s really stable and fast now. You might think “oh, couldn’t you use bittorrent?” but that adds a lot of overhead. (That paper is older, but the numbers haven’t made it look more appealing in the time since then.)
If we want to go with what works, then, we can’t mirror the NVD API — that would require processing and these mirrors are not that smart. But it turns out… people didn’t really love the NVD API. It definitely filled a need for some folk, but when they tried to turn off the old file-based data so many people protested that the original deadline for removing the files got pushed out and pushed out. So we can probably guess that many users would like the files as much or better than the API, assuming they could get them faster and without rate limits.
So here’s what it looks like:
We are running our own API crawler
Generating json files compatible to the original ones
Signing those files with possibly the sketchiest gpg key on the planet
Mirroring these files to a worldwide CDN we created
Literally solving the entire API / DDOS problem for… free?
Since cve-bin-tool has to speak API already, we can have cve-bin-tool output valid json files when needed. Although since NVD is still providing the json files at the time of this writing, we can (and do) get their files directly.
I should note that the technical implementation and testing in a live environment took a few months once we decided to do it. Much faster than waiting for funding!
Why should you trust us?
First: we are not affiliated with NIST, and they were not involved in any of this. Although I did email them so they knew who was behind it in case it came up and I got a nice email saying effectively they don’t officially endorse anything, which is fine. I want to joke that I’m the pirate radio of vuln data, but recall that the data is licensed public so there’s no piracy involved. Just fast and efficient transmission of perfectly allowed data.
So why should you trust some internet randos to get you vulnerability data? After all, the software security industry tries to tell you to stop downloading files served by random people on the internet! But these are the same servers that you’re probably using to get security updates, so… you probably already do trust them?
For a lot of the software on these mirrors, it’s a trust-but-verify solution where the packages are signed and package managers validate those so even if one of the data centres wanted to serve up malicious code, it wouldn’t get auto-installed unless they also compromised some build and signing servers. So you’re trusting not just the mirror, but the whole process to make sure the mirror serves up the right data.
If you’re going to build some similar verification into your tool that uses NVD data, you can verify our (sketchy) gpg signatures so you know it came from us, but you can also validate the data against NVD itself. For the json files they provide some metadata you can use. If we’re generating our own json (as we expect to do when they turn off theirs) then it might get a bit more complicated, but you can probably figure something out. For example, if validating all the data is impractical, you could have something that uses the API to double-check only the CVEs you care about. You can also always use us as your “seed” source and then update against NVD directly thus overwriting as needed.
(Incidentally, don’t bother trying to run a json schema check on the data as part of your checks unless you like noise. We did this in cve-bin-tool and had to turn it to just warn instead of halting because NVD themselves produce invalid json files frequently enough that it was a problem. Turns out keeping a giant database full of user-submitted data valid is hard.)
Basically, go nuts. Those little thin clients can handle full fedora releases and don’t even max out on release day any more. Please use them! They should be fast, they are probably significantly less overloaded than the main NVD servers, and there’s no rate limits or API keys needed. Plus, you’ll make pretty marks on John’s graphs.
You can also use the mirror data as part of cve-bin-tool so you don’t have to build your own scanning service!
I noticed a problem where software vulnerability data about CVEs was getting harder and harder to access, and roped the fine folk of the FCIX Micro Mirror project into hosting a copy of this publicly available data on https://cveb.in/ which they are doing for free thanks to donations of time, money, and server rack space from a variety of folk. These mirrors are fast, available worldwide, not rate limited, and we would love it if you used them.
Contacting us
The comments for this post will turn off after a few weeks because I don’t feel like dealing with spam, feel free to hit me or John up with questions on the fediverse anytime! We’d also to love to hear how you use https://cveb.in/
I’m not actively working on mirroring anything else at the moment, but I *do* think it would be super cool if we could get the micro mirror system to help provide files for pypi / pip. So if you’ve got a lead there and global distribution of python packages sounds like a good idea, let us know! And if you’ve got any other way we could make the world a better place for free, that’s cool too.
This is part of my series on “best practices in practice” where I talk about best practices and related tools I use as an open source software developer and project maintainer. These can be specific tools, checklists, workflows, whatever. Some of these have been great, some of them have been not so great, but I’ve learned a lot. I wanted to talk a bit about the usability and assumptions made in various tools and procedures, especially relative to the wider conversations we need to have about open source maintainer burnout, mentoring new contributors, and improving the security and quality of software.
If you’re running Linux, usually there’s a super easy way to check for updates and apply them. For example, on Fedora Linux `sudo dnf update` will do the magic for you. But if you’re producing software with dependencies outside of a nice distro-managed system, figuring out what the latest version is or whether the version you’re using is still supported can sometimes be a real chore, especially if you’re maintaining software that is written in multiple programming languages. And as the software industry is trying to be more careful about shipping known vulnerable or unsupported packages, there’s a lot of people trying to find or make tools to help manage and monitor dependencies.
I see a lot of people trying to answer “what’s the latest” and “which versions are still getting support” questions themselves with web scrapers or things that read announcement mailing list posts, and since this came up last week on the Mailman irc channel, I figured I’d write a blog post about it. I realize lots of people get a kick out of writing scrapers as a bit of a programming exercise and it’s a great task for beginners. But I do want to make sure you know you don’t *have* to roll your own or buy a vendor’s solution to answer these questions!
At the time that I’m writing this, the website claims it’s monitoring 313030 packages, so there’s a good chance that someone has already set up monitoring for most things you need so you don’t need to spend time writing your own scraper. It monitors different things depending on the project.
It’s backed by software called Anitya, in case you want to set up something just for your own monitoring. But for the project where I use it, it turned out to be just as easy to use the API.
What are the supported versions?
My favourite tool for looking up “end of life” dates is https://endoflife.date/ (so easy to remember!). It also has an API (note that you do need to enable javascript or the page will appear blank). It only tracks 343 products but does take requests for new things to track.
I personally use this regularly for the python end of life dates, mostly for monitoring when to disable support for older versions of Python.
I also really like their Recommendations for publishing End-of-life dates and support timelines as a starting checklist for projects who will be providing longer term support. I will admit that my own open source project doesn’t publish this stuff and maybe I could do better there myself!
Conclusion
If you’re trying to do better at monitoring software, especially for security reasons, I hope those are helpful links to have!
This is part of my series on “best practices in practice” where I talk about best practices and related tools I use as an open source software developer and project maintainer. These can be specific tools, checklists, workflows, whatever. Some of these have been great, some of them have been not so great, but I’ve learned a lot. I wanted to talk a bit about the usability and assumptions made in various tools and procedures, especially relative to the wider conversations we need to have about open source maintainer burnout, mentoring new contributors, and improving the security and quality of software.
I was just out at Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, which is a gathering of open source mentors associated with Google’s program. Everyone there regularly works with new contributors who have varying levels of ability and experience, and we want to maintain codebases that have good quality, so one of the sessions I attended was about tools and practices for code quality. Pre-commit is one of the tools that came up in that session that I use regularly, so I’d like to talk about it today. This is a tool I wouldn’t have thought to look for on my own, but someone else recommended it to me and did the initial config for my project, so I’m happy to pay that forwards by recommending it to others.
Pre-commit helps you run checks before your code can be checked to git. Your project provides a config file of whatever tools it recommends you use. Once you’ve got pre-commit installed, you can tell it to use that file, and then those checks will run when you type `git commit` with it halting if you don’t pass a check so you can fix it before you “save” the code. By default it only runs on files you changed and can be tuned by the project maintainers to skip files that aren’t compliant yet, so you don’t generally get stuck fixing other people’s technical debt unless that’s something that the maintainers chose to do.
Under the hood there’s some magic happening to make sure it can install, set up, and configure the tools. It does tell you what’s happening on the command line, but it’s worlds better than having to install them all yourself, and it puts it into a separate environment so you don’t have to worry about needing slightly different versions for different projects. Honestly, the only time I’ve had trouble with this tool was when I was using it in a weird environment behind a proxy and some combination of things meant that pre-commit was unable to set up tools for me. I think that’s more of a failure of the environment than of the tool, and it’s been shockingly easy to set up and use on every other development machine where I’ve used it. One command to install pre-commit, then one command to set it up for each project where I use it.
I’m sure there are some programmers who are incredibly disciplined and manage to run all required checks themselves manually, but I am not the sort of person who memorizes huge arrays of commands and flags and remembers to run them Every Single Time. I am the sort of person who writes scripts to automate stuff because I will forget. Before pre-commit I would have had a shell script to do the thing, but now I don’t have to write those for projects that already have a config file ready for me. Thus, pre-commit speaks to the heart of how I work as a developer. I got into computers because I could make them do the boring stuff.
Image Description: A photo of the package locker in a US shared mailbox. A label around the keyhole reads “open” with arrows and then says “key will remain in lock after opening door” — it’s a great example of design that doesn’t rely on users remembering to do the right thing (in this case, giving back the key for future use)
Pre-commit also speaks to the heart of my computer security philosophy: any security that relies on humans getting things 100% right 100% of the time is doomed to fail eventually. And although a lot of this blog is about knitting and fountain pens and my hobby work, I want to remind you that I’m not just some random person on the internet when it comes to talking about computer security: I have a PhD in web security policy and I work professionally as an open source security researcher. Helping people write and maintain better code is a large portion of my day job. A lot of the most effective work in security involves making it easy and “default” for people to make the most secure choices. (See the picture above for a more physical example of the design philosophy that ensures users do the right thing.)
Using pre-commit takes a bunch of failure points out of our code quality and security process and makes it easier for developers to do the right thing. For my current work open source project, we recommend people install it and use it on their local systems, then we run it again in our continuous integration system and require the checks to pass there before the code can be merged into the main branch.
As a code contributor:
I like that pre-commit streamlines the whole process of setting up tools. I just type pre-commit install in the directory of code I intend to modify and it does the work.
I can read the .pre-commit-config.yaml file to find out a list of recommended tools and configurations for a project all in one place. Good if you’re suspicious of installing and using random things without looking them up, but also great for learning about projects or about new tools that might help you with code quality in other projects.
It only runs on files I changed, so the fixes it recommends are usually relevant to me and not someone else’s technical debt haunting me.
It never forgets to run a check. (unless I explicitly tell it to)
It helps me fix any issues it finds before they go into git, so I don’t feel obliged to fuss around with my git history to hide my mistakes. Git history is extremely obnoxious to fuss with and I prefer to do it as infrequently as humanly possible.
It also subtly makes me feel more professional to know that all the basic checks are handled before I even make a pull request. I’ve been involved in open source so long that I mostly don’t care about my coding mistakes being public knowledge, but I know from mentoring others that a lot of people find the idea of making a mistake in public very hard, and they want to be better than the average contributor from the get-go. This is definitely a way to make your contributions look better than average!
It gives me nearly immediate, local feedback if my code is going to need fixes before it can be merged. I like that I get feedback usually before my brain has moved on to the next problem, so it fits into my personal mental flow before I even go to look at another window.
It can get you feedback considerably faster than waiting for checks to run in a continuous integration system. If you’re lucky, a system like github actions can get you feedback within a few minutes on quick linter-style checks, but if the system is backed up it or if you’re a new contributor to a project and someone has to approve things before they run (to make sure you’re not just running a cryptominer or other malicious code in their test system!), it can take hours or days to get feedback. Being able to fix things before the tests run can save a lot of time!
As a project maintainer:
Letting me configure the linters and pre-checks I want in one place instead of multiple config files is pretty fantastic and keeps the root directory of my project a lot less full of crap.
It virtually eliminates problems where someone uses a tool subtly differently than I do. If you’re not an open source project maintainer who works with random people on the internet you may not realize how much of a hassle it is helping people configure multiple development tools, but let me tell you, it’s a whole lot easier to just tell them to use pre-commit.
Endlessly helping people get started and answering the same questions over and over can be surprisingly draining! It’s one of the things we really watch for in Google Summer of Code when trying to make sure our mentors don’t burn out. Anything I can do that makes life easier for contributors and mentors and avoid repetitive conversations has an outsized value in my toolkit.
Being able to run exactly the same stuff in our continuous integration/test system means even if my contributors know nothing about it, I still get the benefits of those checks happening before I do my code review.
It saves me a lot of time back-and-forth with contributors asking for fixes so it lets me get their code merged faster. A nicer experience for all of us!
I can usually configure which files need to be skipped, so it can help us upgrade our code quality slowly. Or I can use it as a nudge to encourage people changing a file to also fix minor issues if I so desire.
What gets run with pre-commit will obviously depend on the project, but I think it’s probably helpful to give you an idea of what I run. I talked about using black, the python code formatter in a previous best practices post. For my work open source project, it’s only one of several code quality linters we use. We also use pyupgrade to help us be forward-compatibile with python syntaxes, bandit to help us find python security issues, gitlint to help us provide consistency in commit messages (we use the conventional commits format rules), and mypy to help us slowly add static typing to our code base.
Usually before installing a new pre-commit hook, I make sure all files will pass the checks (and disable scanning of files that won’t). Some tools are pretty good at a slow upgrade if you so desire. One such tool for us as been interrogate, which prompts people to add docstrings — I have it set up with a threshold so the files will pass. The output when pre-commit runs generates a report with red segments in it if there’s missing docstrings for some functions, even if the check passes so you don’t have to fix them. Sometimes that means someone working in that file will go ahead and fix those interrogate warnings while they’re working on their bugs, and that’s incredibly nice.
I’ll probably talk about some of these tools more later on in this best practices in practice series, but that should give you some hints of things you might run in pre-commit if you don’t already have your own list of code quality tools!
Summary
Pre-commit is a useful tool to help maintain code quality (and potentially security!) and it can be used to slowly improve over time.
I only found out about pre-commit because someone else told me and I’m happy to spread the word. I don’t think tools like pre-commit attract evangelists the way some other code-adjacent tools do, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing I learned about when I learned to code, when I got involved in opens source initially, or even when I was in university (which was long after I learned to code and got into open source). I’m sure it’s not the only tool in this category, but it’s the one I use and I like it enough that I haven’t felt a need to shop around for alternatives. I don’t know if it’s better for python than for other languages, but I love it enough that I could see myself contributing to make it work in other environments as needed, or finding similar tools now that I know this is an option.
As a project maintainer, I feel like it helps improve the experience both for new contributors who can use it to help guide them to submit code I’ll be able to merge, and for experienced contributors and mentors who then don’t have to spend as much time helping people get started and dealing with minor code nitpicks during code reviews. As an open source security researcher, I feel like it’s a pretty powerful tool to help improve code quality and security with easy feedback to developers before we even get to the manual code review stage. As a developer, I like that it helps me follow any project’s best practices and gives me feedback so I can fix things before another human even sees my code.
I hope other people will have similar good experiences with pre-commit!
It was likely inevitable that I’d start thinking seriously about having some travel-specific fountain pens. I’m no longer the world traveller I was in my 20s when writing papers and going to conferences to present them was a key part of my job, but I have a certain amount of travel-specific stuff in my life. (I’ve been cataloguing and reviewing some of my favourite travel gear here on the blog.)
Image description: My travel stationery setup: Field Notes notebook, Pikachu mechanical pencil & 2 pikachu gel pens from Zebra, Platinum Preppy Wa with koi, Pilot Kakuno in purple, a teensy pencil crayon set, an eraser in a orange case with ears, Burt’s Bees lip balm, a Fisher space pen, Lanisoh lanolin, all packaged with two Tom Bihn ghost whale pouches and a key strap to clip them into my bag.
For pens, I didn’t want to have something that only got used a few times per year, so I decided my travel pen(s) would need to do double-duty in my backpack for out and about jotting down of notes and doodling in restaurants/airports/cars to keep my kid amused. The picture above shows my travel setup except that I forgot to include the Traveler’s Notebook calendar that I’m currently using for tracking headaches, etc. Sometimes I carry all of that in my backpack, sometimes I slim it down and only carry the pencil and eraser, depending on how much I expect to be on my feet vs sitting. Most of this I already had for my summer trip, the fountain pens are the only part that’s actually new.
Before making any decisions on fountain pens, I read up on a lot of really solid recommendations on types of fountain pens that tend to be better for travel:
Vacuum filling and Japanese-style eyedropper pens are less likely to leak in flights despite their larger capacity.
Smaller pocket pens could be lighter for toting around, and might be less of a mess in case of a pensplosion because they had less ink.
Finer nibs use less ink, if you need what you’ve got to last.
And then some tips for just travelling with what you’ve got:
Travelling with a full pen or a fully empty one both made air pressure changes less risky.
Having pens nib-up during flight would reduce risk of ink blooping out since air could escape more easily.
Having the option to use cartridges instead of bottle-filling could be convenient and less messy.
I’m really not sure about the cartridge thing — sure, it’s convenient on the way out, but for short trips I’m highly unlikely to finish a cartridge and there’s no way to stopper most of them, so I felt like I’d still be stuck flying with an open reservoir on the way home. But I guess it works for some people who either write more or are more willing to throw away a half-filled cartridge than I am?
After much internal debate and online shopping, I decided I wasn’t ready to buy a more expensive vacuum filling pen (yet) or even a nicer “sport” or “pocket” pen. I felt like buying an expensive pen would undercut my plan for handing this to my kid for distraction and doodles. But I also hadn’t loved my existing stub-nibbed pens with my travel notebook so I didn’t want to just travel with what I had again. So I went the $10-15 starter pen route instead for my trip to Google Summer of Code mentor summit in October.
Pilot Kakuno
First on my travel list was a Pilot Kakuno. I already had the converter for this since I’d intended to try it in my Pilot Metropolitan eventually. I went with the medium nib for personal ergonomics reasons and also because I was still fussing with the Metropolitan CM nib so this gave me an excuse to use the medium and have the option to swap them later if I never got the hang of the CM. The CM and are are getting along fine now, but I did this purchase earlier in September before I was reasonably confident with it. The medium is significantly less fussy than the CM, so much so that my kid and I didn’t have much difficulty drawing stuff with it.
Image Description: A doodle of a Corgi ready to dig in to a plate of bacon and eggs with a fork and a knife. This was a quick copy of some cute artwork we bought in San Jose Japantown.
I really like this pen. Since it’s plastic, it feels absurdly light compared to the Metropolitan, and that was absolutely a feature rather than a drawback for a pen I intend to carry a lot. The medium nib is more user-friendly than the CM (not that CM would have been an option on this pen, just that it’s what I was used to). I chose better on my ink, which also helped. I’ve got Jaques Herbin Violette Pensée in there because it matched nicely and because I knew I’d want a purple ink in my October planner palette anyhow.
Image Description: Pilot Kakuno pen disassembled to show the CON-40 converter I’m using and the fact that after the trip I’ve got more than 1/3 of a tank of ink left.
The CON-40 converter that I have is pretty small (it’s one of the big complaints about it), but for a weekend trip with two pens getting rotated this was more than enough. And having a smaller reservoir does mean less risk in case of total pen failure at altitude.
Platinum Preppy Wa
Second was a Platinum Preppy Wa. I could have chosen a cheaper, less fancy edition of the Preppy, but then I wouldn’t be me. (It wasn’t that much more expensive anyhow.) It also amuses me greatly that this is the “Wa” edition as my kid decided when he was learning to speak that “wa time” was his term for nursing, so I spent quite a lot of time hearing that syllable even though it’s obviously a different word. Add on the “Koi no Taki-Nobori” fishy pattern being associated with the koi banners flown for children’s day and, well, clearly this particular pen was the one for me.
Image Description: Platinum Preppy Wa Koi no Taki-Nobori version with koi fish in silver on a dark blue barrel. The cap is off so you can see the spring mechanism a bit more clearly.
Like the Kakuno, the Preppy Wa feels absurdly light compared to the others in my collection and that’s a definite advantage for my purposes. I got a fine rather than medium nib so this would be different (and also because it’s what was in stock) and while I definitely don’t love the fine nib as much for writing, I was really happy to have it for drawing:
Image Description: My drawing of a Western Conifer Seed Bug, done mostly in fountain pen with some pencil for shading.Image Description: A Western Conifer Seed Bug sitting on a green poinsettia leaf. It’s a large elongated shield-shaped bug with long antennae and a pattern on the back that looks like a sketch of a mountain range.
The fine nib is also undeniably nice in my smaller travel notebook and on my calendar, though I mostly use pencil in the calendar anyhow.
I also was amused to see that the patented cap design mentioned in their ad copy includes a spring that’s pleasantly visible through the clear plastic cap, so I can watch it clip into place. Very satisfying. The artwork on the barrel is also raised and textured. I find it pleasant to touch but I do worry that it may get rubbed off over time. I guess I could make/find a sleeve for it?
I don’t own a converter for the Preppy Wa and I’m currently planning to try refilling the cartridge with a syringe. I don’t know that I’d feel super comfortable flying with a cartridge that had been refilled many times (I assume after a while they probably wouldn’t seal as well against the nib) so I’ll likely either buy a converter or a fresh cartridge for the next plane flight. We’ll see how I feel about it once I’ve actually tried a refill.
Flying with the pens
I tried to learn from my experience flying with the TWSBI Eco-T where I did have a leak, so I was more careful about making sure that I tightened the piston before my pens were packed, which probably helped. I also moved things around in my bag so my ebook reader (which I always pull out before takeoff) was sitting next to the pens so I wouldn’t forget to move them to be upright.
I flew to California with the Kakuno very full of purple ink using the converter and the Preppy Wa without a cartridge installed. I managed to put the Kakuno in my pen case upside down, so I flew with it nib *down* (pretty much the least recommended position) instead of the nib-up that I’d planned, but I suffered no leaks anyhow. Though the idea of making sure the air is at the top for pressure changes makes some sense, this makes me wonder how much it really matters in a modern pen. There are ball bearings in that converter to limit flow when it’s nib-down, for example, so my particular setup may not have been hugely different than a ballpoint when nib down. If you’ve ever heard of someone doing a proper scientific experiment on fountain pen orientation vs leakage in flight, I’d love to know about it! (If I had a lot of pens and a pressure pot I’ll bet I could design something…)
I flew back with the Kakuno less full and the Preppy Wa with the original black cartridge installed. This time I was a bit more careful about my pen orientation so they both flew tip up, and again no leaks. Yay!
Image Description: A Platinum Preppy Wa (Koi pattern) and Pilot Kakuno (purple) sitting on my notebook, which is open to a page with info about the Clapotis shawl I’ve started knitting, written in purple ink. The notebook is being held open with help from a brass clip/stencil ruler from Midori
In conclusion…
Both pens worked out great for writing, drawing, and even for amusing my kid. They both flew with no leaks and have tootled around town in my backpack being useful with no incidents before and after the trip. They weigh hardly anything because they’re plastic.
One mild surprise was that I used a lot more ink in the Kakuno than I expected, largely because I wrote more than expected. That does give me an excuse to look at pens with larger reservoirs if I’m planning to be gone for more than week or if I expect to take more notes. But with a larger reservoir would come more weight, so a vacuum filler might wind up in a different niche in my collection — airline travel and journalling at home rather than airline travel and backpack pen.
Though I still do want to try some fancier pens, I don’t feel like I need to get a vacuum filler or japanese eyedropper before I jump on a plane again. With the magic of zipped plastic bags I don’t really feel worried about taking these two on a plane. I don’t really expect leaks, but no harm in being cautious.
In short, these worked out well for both air travel and around town use! Almost too well because now I have less excuse to buy more pens, but I can live with that.
Honestly, I mostly bought this pen because I wanted a glowing pen for October. I usually keep this one by my bed so I can see it glow, rather than in the case with the rest of the pens I intend to use for the month. Perhaps there is a deep psychological insight that can be gained from the fact that I choose to see a glowing fountain pen just before I fall asleep, but honestly glowing things are just cool and I like getting them for myself instead of just my kid. (I have some cool glowing stickers from an artist I like also near my bedside, and I’ve made two quilts that glow.)
Image Description: TWSBI Eco Fountain pen, glowing just a little in half-shaded light.
My daily journal setup is very similar to the travel stationery setup I showed in my travel bags post, so if I left it in the pen case it’d hardly ever get any light! It does mean I sometimes have to walk upstairs to get it if I decide that is the pen I need for the moment, but I can handle that in exchange for GLOW PEN.
From a functional writing perspective, there’s not much new to say about this versus my other TWSBI pens, except that I went with a medium nib this time so this could serve as a replacement for my mystery wood pen. Some kind folk made good suggestions on how I could fix the mystery wood pen when I’m ready, but I’m tired of fighting with it and decided I just wanted a pen that was easier to use. (I still intend to fix it eventually, but I’m waiting until I’m feeling more excited about the experience, so for now the pen is cleaned out and put away.)
The medium nib here is noticeably thicker than on my original pen (see image below), which is closer to the Pilot medium than the TWSBI medium. It might have been a fine nib if it had a label, but it didn’t, so I’m guessing. The bigger nib works for me: as I mentioned previously, it’s ergonomically easier for me if I write bigger and the wider nib helps encourage me to do so.
Image Description: My green glow-in-the-dark TWSBI Eco sits on a small notebook open to a page where I’ve written samples from a bunch of different pens/inks. The relevant part is that the TWSBI Eco sample at the bottom is thicker than the mystery wood pen writing at the top of the page, but you can also see samples from a couple of pilot medium nibs (both thinner than the glow pen), a pilot CM nib (similar width to the glow pen but more line variation), and the 1.1 stub nibs from my other TWSBI pens (both thicker than the glow pen).
I’m really happy with this pen: I love the glow. I can write long journal entries with it just like I do with the stub nibs without any weird hand twinges, and I don’t have to be careful with it the way I have to with my Pilot <CM> to make sure I don’t lose the ink flow. (Though the Pilot Metropolitan <CM> is getting more instinctual as I practice now that I’ve got more compatible ink in it, so the difference in writing with it may be moot eventually.) I’m glad to focus more on what I’m writing than how I’m writing it. I don’t think I prefer the medium nib over my existing 1.1 stub ones, but I like having the variety available when I go to pull a pen out, especially for doodling, so I’m glad to have this one in my collection.
The Glow Pen is a lovely replacement for my original pen and what it lacks in history and character, it makes up in being incredibly easy to use and did I mention it glows? I don’t think I can mention that enough.
Fountain pens make me think a lot about Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, the konmari “does it spark joy?” question and especially a follow-up study I read about the “pretty things are more usable” effect that I’m too lazy to find a link for right now but the gist of it was “sure, Japanese people find pretty things more usable, but surely Israeli users wouldn’t see this effect” but then the results of the study were that even their study participants found the pretty ATM interface more usable and I loved the way the researchers reported this faithfully with such gentle grumpiness about their results. Which is all to say that science says that my love of the glow probably makes this pen work better for me, and I’m happy to lean in to that effect!
As expected, I finished my bullet journal, just barely managing to fit an entry for Sept 30th, 2024 on the last page. It was started on January 1, 2023, so it lasted just under 2 years. The corgi design is from Kela Designs, and I bought it for myself on the condition that I actually *use* it and not have it wind up in the unused notebook stash.
Image Description: A pair of A5 journals and a clear writing board. On top is my new journal, a Rhodia softcover, and underneath is my hardcover corgi journal from Kela Designs. Both are sitting on a quilt a friend made for my wedding.
I’d never actually done a bullet journal when I started this, though I’d written short journal entries on and off since I was a kid. I hadn’t really made much effort in tracking stuff but it seems like such a part of bullet journal culture that I figured I’d try it out, and some of it worked for me and other parts didn’t. It was great treating each month as a new event where I could set up different pages and iterate rather than sticking with a layout preset for the whole year. Those big blank pages also gave me more space for doodling, stickers, washi tape and eventually fountain pens.
Image Description: A doodle of a husky dog with hearts, drawn in fountain pen with some pencil for colour. It is surrounded by some red text from a journal entry.
Mostly my journal is for me and me alone, but in celebration of this one getting filled up I thought I’d share some doggust doodles and other marginalia as a bit of a send off. Most of these were drawn from random cute dog pictures I found via image searches.
Image Description: Doggust drawings from 2023. Doggust is a “draw a dog every day in August” art prompt series. Here I’ve pasted in a dog drawn on a scratch-off note card, and a painting of rainbow spotted dalmations.Image Description: A doodle page in my bullet journal with fountain pen drawings. It features a corgi, miscellaneous house items, leaves, stars and abstract shapes, a copying of an alphabet/number font, and another small dog.Image Description: A small cartoon potted plant with a happy face on the pot. It is drawn in green and purple fountain pen, and is surrounded by other text in my bullet journal.
And a bonus: my kid’s first fountain pen drawing! He wanted to try my new glow in the dark pen, although alas I don’t have glow in the dark ink.
Image Description: A small smiling sun drawn in green fountain pen by my then 6 year old kid. His first time using a fountain pen! If you look closely you can see where he made a dent in the paper instead of a line near the top of the sun.
While half of the “bullet journal method” wasn’t for me, I’ve found that I do love the dot grid format, and I’ve got a new journal set up to go for October now! My post about auditioning new bullet journals can tell you about how I chose my new notebook, and I also talked about the calendar part of my bullet journal journey in I hate the “future log” of my bullet journal. So this time I’ve got a smaller calendar and a listing of my fountain pens/inks for October!
Image Description: A beginning of the month page in my new journal, featuring halloween themed stickers, a small calendar, and a list of pens and inks. There’s a green TWSBI Eco fountain pen with a glow in the dark green cap propped against the next cream coloured bullet journal page.
I’m excited about my new setup and thankful for my first journal for the past two years together!
I picked this pen up at the same time as my TWSBI pens (Making this pen 5 in my collection), with a similar vision in mind: trying the big stub nibs. This one sports a CM / Italic / 1.0mm stub. My first impression upon getting the pen was overwhelmingly positive: this is a solidly built pen and the Retro Pop Red colour was very much like a larger version of the red Fisher Space Pen which had been my stalwart companion through the huge amount of solo travel I did in my 20s as a graduate student.
Image Description: A pair of red pens with scissors and washi tape also in the picture. the pen on top is the Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop Red and the one below is a Fisher Space Pen. Both pens share a similar “cigar” shape and red metallic body, but the Metropolitan is wider and longer.
I was even delighted to see the bladder filing mechanism, as that matched the pen I’d used as a teenager and I didn’t even know anyone made those any more!
My first day writing with it I was just as happy as I was with the TWSBI pens. I was imagining buying a small set of different colours and having them inked up in thematic colours for each month of my journal. It was going to be elegant and perfect.
And then the next day I went to use it, the pen stopped working.
I’ll save you the journey of frustration I had and say that there were a few things in play here:
The ink I chose was not a good fit with this pen. I hadn’t realized when chose an ink sample in lower light that it was going to be so sparkly. I spent a lot of time cleaning the pen.
The reservoir was small enough that I was also running out of ink.
I couldn’t always tell which thing was going wrong.
After a month of fighting with it, I felt like I’d spent more time cleaning and refilling than actually writing with the thing. I kept “running out of ink” (or getting clogged) halfway through journal entries. The low ink/dried out feel was leaving me with a scratchy, unpleasant writing experience, and I was starting to wonder if I had a bad pen or what. So I swapped in the ink cartridge that came with it, thinking it was probably going to give me the best experience with the pen anyhow.
… and it promptly ran dry in the middle of the sentence the first time I tried to use it.
In hindsight, I probably needed to wait for the ink to saturate the nib more, or maybe I got unlucky with a bubble? I hadn’t used a cartridge in years and the instructions basically just said to give it a gentle squeeze or two, which was clearly not enough. I put the pen nib-down for a rest and left it there for a couple of days until I was done being mad at it.
And it’s been perfect ever since.
Image Description: A pair of red pens with scissors and washi tape also in the picture. the pen on top is the Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop Red and the one below is a Fisher Space Pen. Both pens share a similar “cigar” shape and red metallic body, but the Metropolitan is wider and longer. This time the pens have both been uncapped into a regular writing configuration for me, showing that the space pen with the cap “posted” on the back is of similar length to the unposted Metropolitan.
It would be funny to just end on that note, but I’ll add a bit more: I am slowly falling back in love with this pen now that it’s got appropriate ink in it. I picked up some Pilot Iroshizuku ink samples since many people recommended them as being better “behaved” so I’m hopeful that I’ll have a good experience when the cartridge runs out, and if those work out I’ll spring for bottles. I’m unlikely to buy cartridges but I’ve got a syringe so I might try cleaning and refilling this one — I think it’s holding a lot more ink than I was getting in the bladder-thing. I guess I could try using the syringe to top up the bladder so running out of ink doesn’t happen as often? I also picked up a clear converter so I can try that out and see if being able to check ink levels quickly makes my life better.
When it’s writing well and not having ink issues, the Pilot 1.0 stub is very similar to the TWSBI 1.1stub that I loved (see previous post) but being a bit thinner, it fits better in my calendar pages and results in a slightly more legible handwriting for me. I feel like it’s less smooth, but I can’t decide if that’s because I keep expecting it to run out of ink now or a real thing.
In summary: this pen and I had a really rough start, but I learned a lot about pen cleaning and ink and I think we’ll work well together now. I still kind of want to collect all the colours, but this one highlighted that I should probably try a few more nibs and that maybe the Pilot wasn’t going to be the pen of my dreams for trying all the most sparkly ink. But wow, it’s a lovely pen, and I’m glad I can finally understand why it makes so many people’s beginner fountain pen lists.
I’m starting a little mini-series about some of the “best practices” I’ve tried out in my real-life open source software development. These can be specific tools, checklists, workflows, whatever. Some of these have been great, some of them have been not so great, but I’ve learned a lot. I wanted to talk a bit about the usability and assumptions made in various tools and procedures, especially relative to the wider conversations we need to have about open source maintainer burnout, mentoring new contributors, and improving the security and quality of software.
Black’s tagline is “the uncompromising Python code formatter” and it pretty much is what it says on the tin: it can be used to automatically format Python code, and it’s reasonably opinionated about how it’s done with very few options to change. It starts with pep8 compliance (that’s the python style guide for those of you don’t need to memorize such things) and takes it further. I’m not going to talk about the design decisions they made but the black style guide is actually an interesting read if you’re into this kind of thing.
I’m probably a bit more excited about style guides than the average person because I spent several years reading and marking student code, including being a teaching assistant for a course on Perl, a language that is famously hard to read. (Though I’ve got to tell you, the first year undergraduates’ Java programs were absolutely worse to read than Perl.) And then in case mounds of beginner code wasn’t enough of a challenge, I also was involved in a fairly well-known open source project (GNU Mailman) with a decade of code to its name even when I joined so I was learning a lot about the experience of integrating code from many contributors into a single code base. Both of these are… kind of exhausting? I was young enough to not be completely set in my ways, but especially with the beginner Java code, it became really clear that debugging was harder when the formatting was adding a layer of obfuscation to the code. I’d have loved to have an autoformatter for Java because so many students could find their bugs easier once I showed them how to fix their indents or braces.
And then I spent years as an open source project maintainer rather than just a contributor, so it was my job to enforce style as part of code reviews. And… I kind of hated that part of it? It’s frustrating to have the same conversation with people over and over about style and be constantly leaving the same code review comments, and then on top of that sometimes people don’t *agree* with the style and want to argue about it, or people can’t be bothered to come back and fix it themselves so I either have to leave a potentially good bug fix on the floor or I have to fix it myself. Formatting code elegantly can be fun once in a while, but doing it over and over and over and over quickly got old for me.
So when I first heard about Black, I knew it was a thing I wanted for my projects.
Now when someone submits a thing to my code base, Black runs alongside the other tests, and they get feedback very quickly if their code doesn’t meet our coding standards. It takes hardly any time to run. Many new contributors even notice failing required test and go do some reading and fix it before I even see it, and for those that don’t fix issues before I get there I get a much easier conversation that amounts to “run black on your files and update the pull request.” I don’t have to explain what they got wrong and why it matters — they don’t even need to understand what happens when the auto-formatter runs. It just cleans things up and we move on with life.
I feel like the workflow might actually be better if when Black was run in our continuous integration system and automatically updated the submitted code, but there’s some challenges there around security and permissions that we haven’t gotten around to solving. And honestly, it’s kind of nice to have an easy low-stress “train the new contributors to use the tools we use” or “share a link to the contributors doc” opening conversation, so I haven’t been as motivated as I might be to fix things. I could probably have a bot leave those comments and maybe one of those days we’ll do that, but I’m going to have to look at the code for code review anyhow so I usually just add it in to the code review comments.
The other thing that Black itself calls out in their docs is that by conforming to a standard auto-format, we really reduce the differences between existing code and new code. It’s pretty obvious when the first attempt has a pile of random extra lines and is failing the Black check. We get a number of contributors using different integrated development environments (IDEs) that are pretty opinionated themselves, and it’s been freeing to not to deal with whitespace nonsense in pull requests or have people try to tell me on the glory if their IDE of choice when I ask them to fix it. Some python IDEs actually support Black so sometimes I can just tell them to flip a switch or whatever and then they never have to think about it again either. Win for us all!
So here’s the highlights about why I use Black:
As a contributor:
Black lets me not think about style; it’s easy to fix before I put together a pull request or patch.
It saves me from the often confusing messages you get from other style checkers.
Because I got into the habit of running it before I even run my code or tests, it serves as a quick mistake/typo checker.
Some of the style choices, like forcing trailing commas in lists, make editing existing code easier and I suspect increase code quality overall because certain types of bug are more obvious.
As a an open source maintainer:
Black lets me not think about style.
It makes basic code quality conversations easier. I used to have a *lot* of conversations about style and people get really passionate about it, but it wasted a lot of time when the end result was usually going to be “conform to our style if you want to contribute to this project”
Fixing bad style is fast, either for the contributor or for me as needed.
It makes code review easier because there aren’t obfuscating style issues.
It allows for very quick feedback for users even if all our maintainers are busy. Since I regularly work with people in other time zones, this can potentially save days of back and forth before code can be used.
It provides a gateway for users to learn about code quality tools. I work with a lot of new contributors through Google Summer of Code and Hacktoberfest, so they may have no existing framework for professional development. But also even a lot of experienced devs haven’t used tools like Black before!
It provides a starting point for mentoring users about pre-commit checks, continuous integration tests, and how to run things locally. We’ve got other starting points but Black is fast and easy and it helps reduce resistance to the harder ones.
It reduces “bike shedding” about style. Bikeshedding can be a real contributor to burnout of both maintainers and contributors, and this reduces one place where I’ve seen it occur regularly.
It decreases the cognitive overhead of reading and maintaining a full code base which includes a bunch of code from different contributors or even from the same contributor years later. If you’ve spent any time with code that’s been around for decades, you know what I’m talking about.
In short: it helps me reduce maintainer burnout for me and my co-maintainers.
So yeah, that’s Black. It improves my experience as an open source maintainer and as a mentor for new contributors. I love it, and maybe you would too? I highly recommend trying it out on your own code and new projects. (and it’s good for existing projects, even big established ones, but choosing to apply it to an existing code base gets into bikeshedding territory so proceed with caution!)
It’s only for Python, but if you have similar auto-formatters for other languages that you love, let me know! I’d love to have some to recommend to my colleagues at work who focus on other languages.
After a few months of using my mystery wood pen and the Pilot Varsity that I picked up when I bought ink for the first pen, I decided I was clearly having enough fun that I should add a few more pens to my collection.
Image Description: A pair of pens and washi tapes sitting on my bullet journal from Kela Designs which is green and features a drawing of a corgi embossed in gold. The clear pen on top is the TWSBI ECO-T and the light blue one on the bottom is the TWSBI Swipe.
So pen number 3 and 4 were a pair of TWSBI pens. I chose the ECO-T specifically because of the triangular grip since I suspected I could use some grip help. Then I saw the estimated shipping date and realized I might not get it before my next trip, so I panic-bought the Swipe from another vendor, justifying it because it has an interesting set of filling mechanisms. I probably should have gotten different nibs on them, but I was really excited about trying the 1.1mm stub nib so I got it on both. I also picked up a Pilot Metropolitan with a 1mm stub at the same time so that’s number 5. (How long before I give up on assigning them numbers?)
Back when I was a teenager with a repetitive strain injury, I’d been told that I should write bigger, try a fountain pen, and adopt a “messy” and more flowing cursive to make things easier on my hands. Yes, my “bad” handwriting was medically recommended! The 1.1 stub sounded like it could well be the perfect nib for my teenage self to force the big writing, and although that initial injury has long healed, I still rely on my hands to do my day job and my hobbies and well, everything. Spending months unable to use your hands correctly really showcases how many things you do with them. (I 100% do not recommend this experience.) I’ve been very cautious about hand over-use and very aware of how my hands feel ever since, and it’s been good for my other hobbies and work ergonomics.
The TWSBI pens and the 1.1 stub nibs turned out to be everything I hoped. It did take a bit of practice to remember to write more in a calligraphy style and watch the direction in which I dragged the pen, but I had taken calligraphy classes as a child so I actually had a lot of experience writing with a wider nib. I did have a few incidents where I forgot to let the page dry a little bit since these pens put out so much more ink than my first two pens, but thankfully there wasn’t too much smearing and spotting before I got into the right habits.
I will say that my handwriting continues to be illegible, but it’s definitely worse with the big nibs in some ways. I wrote a birthday card to my mom with the ECO-T and making it legible was harder than usual but also kind of more satisfying because it felt like calligraphy. Given my history, I’m totally fine with my handwriting being what it is so it doesn’t bother me, but it does point to me maybe choosing a different pen when I’m writing cards and letters or being very intentional about my writing.
What does matter to me is that I write a lot more with this pen. I’ve been writing journals for years and years, but switched to a bullet journal style at the start of 2023 (just a bit shy of 2 years ago) so my journal entries suddenly became more variable sized instead of “mostly fitting into a pre-printed daily/weekly journal slot” and there are more todo lists involved. At the start of 2023 I was typically writing a few sentences, but since I got the fountain pens and especially the TWSBI ECO-T, I find myself writing more. It started because I had to write a bit bigger so I had to take up more space, but since I got these pens in July I can see my entries getting longer and longer as it became easier and more fun to write with them. (And they were already longer in May-June with my first two fountain pens!) We’ll see if that keeps up over the next year, or whether it’s mostly a “new obsession” kind of thing. My interest in journalling tends to wax and wane normally so I’m not going to fret if I start writing less in future.
The filling mechanisms made less of a difference in writing, but I’m still constantly amused by watching the ink dribble over the big spring in the TWSBI Swipe as I flip it over, so it serves a purpose as a fidget. Because the ink tends to get “stuck” on the spring, I find myself tapping it every time I use the pen. So that was a surprising little bonus: I’d expected entertainment once per fill, not once per write!
Both of my orders arrived in time for the flight, and I did try bringing the TWSBI ECO-T on the plane but made a noob mistake about tightening and then forgot to put the pen upright and I wound up with a tiny leak on the way out. I was pretty annoyed with myself since I’d done a bunch of reading before the flight and thought I knew what I was doing! The leak was well contained in a plastic bag so no big deal. Unfortunately, my other mistake was that I’d grabbed a Field Notes notebook for the trip but didn’t try the pen with it, and it turns out I kind of hated them together. Some of it was that I’d gotten a bit of water in the pen when I cleaned it up after the flight, so the ink was more watery and bled through, but some of it was just that the very wide nib and the dark ink left a lot of ghosting and having gotten spoiled with the thick bamboo paper in my usual bullet journal I just felt like I’d made bad choices and wound up using gel pens and pencil on the trip after all that fuss of getting a pen in time so I would actually write on vacation. You can see the difference on my pen testing page below:
Image Description: A variety of pen names and ink names writen on a testing page of my notebook. Of particular note is the “organics studio nitrogen” sample which shows a dark blue ink with pink edges, then hte one below which says “organics studio accidentally diluted?” and shows a much lighter blue ink with less sheen. If you read them all you can get a preview of the other pens I’ll be talking about later in this series.
Oh well. I won’t blame the pen for the leaks (it was fine on the way back), but I think I’d want a smaller nib for the smaller notebook, and probably lighter ink in my travel pen so ghosting wouldn’t bug me so much. If I switch notebooks, though, I might want to consider taking the Swipe and cartridges as an option with less risk of leakage on the plane. I expect I’ll iterate over my travel setup quite a few more times before I’m through. (And as I said in a previous entry, I’m always happy to hear about other people’s travel setups if you want to share a link or a personal recommendation!)
Back home after the trip I made friends with the pen again and all was well. Some of that was helped by the Organics Studio Nitrogen ink I have in the ECO-T to this day, which I thought was going to be a boring blue when I put it in the pen because I was just grabbing samples out of a bag without looking them up. But it has this glorious pink shiny thing going on and I love it. I had a moment of panic when my sample vial ran low and I couldn’t find it in stock anywhere, but it came back in stock and I’ve now got my first full ink bottle in my collection. I think I’m going to have to clear out the drawer with my washi tape & stickers and make some space for inks!
Image Description: A much smaller notebook’s pen testing page, showing my wood pen in Diamine Marine (teal ink), the TWSBI Swipe 1.1stub in Noodler’s Southwest Sunset (orange ink), the Pilot Metropolitan 1.0 stub in Diamine Red Lustre (red ink), the TWSBI ECO-T 1.1. in Organics Studio Nitrogen (blue/pink), the Pilot Varsity (dark purple), the Pilot Kakuno in Jaques Herbin Violette Pensee (light purple), and the TWSBI Eco M in Diamine Apple Glory (green)
I feel almost like I should apologize for not having bigger writing samples to show here, but since I mostly use the pens for journaling I don’t really have anything I want to post pictures of on the internet! I’ve been rotating through lesser-used crafts as part of my fiber goals this year, and while writing wasn’t exactly on my original planned list, I declared this month “writing month” and I’ve been trying to do more unfiltered writing about my day and stuff as well as things like these blog posts. Yes, I chose writing for this month in part because it fit well with my new pen obsession. I used to write a lot as a hobby and part of the Geek Feminism blog, but I fell out of the habit for a bunch of reasons: some of it was good choices in self care, some was fear of harassment, a lot was about having a kid and not getting as much time to sit with a keyboard anymore. It’s been fun to skip the keyboard for part of this month’s goals, but it does mean a lot of writing that I don’t want to share. Maybe I should take up what other people do and copy some poems or a book as part of my pen testing to make these more interesting? Or maybe I should let it go and just focus on the written words I want to share instead of making more work for myself. Since you’re seeing this without extensive pen testing, you know what choice I made.
These two pens very quickly became my favourites, which is maybe not a surprise since their initial competition was “a wooden pen with a nib that could be better” and “a disposable fountain pen” but it was still lovely to have them work out so well. If I’m going to write a longer entry, these are the pens I grab.
Having these two pens that I like so much did raise the question of “what do I actually want my pen collection to look like?” — I could probably buy 1-2 more of these and cover my basic needs for journalling, spend money on cool inks, and be pretty satisfied in theory. But I know me, and I’m going to want to try more things to see if there’s anything I like better. I have a large collection of knitting needles of different types and shapes, and I used to sample some at the local yarn store as well for the same reason. Ergonomics can be deeply personal and I know the knitting setup that works best for endurance for me took a while to build, and I expect the same will be true about writing and fountain pens. Plus, just like knitting, I’m expecting to want different pens for a few different things: see my problems with these pens as travel companions, for example. Since there’s a variety of cheaper pens available, I expect that I’ll keep rotating through different nibs and brands for a while. And I’ll enjoy having some options for doodling even if they don’t all wind up as my regular writing pens. So this could easily have been the end of my pen journey, but I think it’s likely going to be a journey I’m on for quite a while.
One of the ideas from the “bullet journal” method that never really worked for me is the “future log” one. The idea seems solid: you need a space for writing stuff that’s coming up but maybe not in the current month or week or however you divide your journal. It’s a solid idea and it was very handy. But every time I actually looked at it, it felt… messy? hard to read? It bothered me more than I expected when stuff I jotted down wasn’t in order. I didn’t like not being able to immediately see if there was a conflict in dates I was jotting down. I made it a bit better for myself last year by reading through this future log blog post for inspiration and adding mini calendars into my journal so I could circle or highlight dates and stuff.
Image description: My 2024 “future log” with mini calendars and notes about upcoming things of interest beside it. The entry for April 2024 is shown and it lists the 12th as no school, 18-29 as Gnome MKAL14, and 26 as Romi Clue #1.
But I still didn’t love it. I knew this was something I’d be iterating on again with my next journal. And then after deciding to try one that was considerably smaller than my old 2 year monstrosity, I faced another problem: this journal was likely going to last less than a full year, and it might even last less than my kid’s academic school year. (See choosing my next bullet journal for more about why I chose that.) I was almost certainly going to need to write out a future log now and then another one in probably 6 months.
Image description: A pair of A5 journals stacked one on top of the other. The top one is green and features a gold corgi on the fabric cover, and runs 160 pages. the one underneath is blue and has only 64 pages which are also thinner than those in the big journal.Image Description: Another view of the same two journals stacked one on top of the other. In this case the photo is taken edge-on and you can see that the bottom journal is approximately 1/4 the width of the top one.
I spent a lot of time drawing dots in my current journal and measuring and trying to figure out how to fit usable calendars into the future log, and wondering if I was wasting my time if I wrote in a full academic year calendar into the small journal.
Image description: A page in my bullet journal with dots and initials for days of the week written in different sized grids.
As August rolled around, suddenly people were talking about Hobonichi and other beloved planner systems that would be coming out in the fall. Two years of bullet journal have taught me that I like having variable length entries and not having empty days glaring at me when I didn’t feel like writing. But I love the idea of pre-printed planners and I used them for many years, so even though I knew they weren’t the best fit for me right now, here I was reading about entire systems that I knew I’d never buy. I could claim it was some sort of planner research (and indeed, I do get good ideas from these articles sometimes) but mostly it felt like the stationery nerd equivalent of reading trashy celebrity magazines. I just couldn’t resist.
Eventually, I came back to the idea of the Traveler’s Notebook. As I mentioned in my post about auditioning notebooks, I love the whole vibe of their system: reusable cover, relatively cheap inserts and accessories so you could customize your experience. I tried out the passport size thinking maybe it could be a travel notebook, but it was too small and to this day I’ve only really used it for testing pens. (It’s got nice paper and it’s a good size for that, though. I may actually keep it as a pen and ink testing notebook so I’ll have a nice collection of writing samples.)
I was somewhat convinced that the regular sized Traveler’s was going to be too tall and still not wide enough, but I’d learned a lot from getting the tiny notebook. What if I got an undated calendar insert in the bigger size and tried it out? Rather than getting frustrated with the whole “future log” setup, I could just have a monthly planner that went with my bullet journal. The info would be organized the way I wanted it, and it would hopefully be small enough to tote around with my new, smaller bullet journal. And I could quit drawing dots in my notebook trying to make it work.
Lucky for me, I actually prefer my year to start in September, so the timing was good. (Look, I have three degrees and a postdoc — most of my life that’s been the “real” beginning of the year and with my kid in school now it’s when I get the biggest pile of new dates to write down too.) So I picked one up in August before the planners dropped. This might have been an attempt to head off the temptation before I went and bought something that I knew deep in my heart wasn’t going to suit me.
Image description: A Tom Bihn A5 ghost whale pouch containing a Field Notes larger black notebook, the Traveler’s notebook Monthly calendar (cream coloured), my blue/turquoise future bullet journal, a pikachu mechanical pencil and an eraser in a plastic case with a kitty face and ears.
I was delighted to find that the monthly book fits comfortably in one of my A5 Tom Bihn ghost whale pouches — the measurements made me nervous that it would feel tight around the zipper but it doesn’t seem to be a problem since nothing in there is too thick. I’ve written about how I use the ghost whale pouches for travel, and when I’m not travelling that one of the A5 pouches lives either in my knitting bag or my purse/backpack. The goal is eventually to have my bullet journal in there on the regular once I switch to the smaller one, so I threw it in so you could see the size differences in the picture.
I left it in the knitting bag for a week to see if it stuck out or got destroyed by the other things I carry. Typically I carry my knitting bag around the house with me so I can work on my knitting project or read my book no matter where I happen to sit or what activity my kid wants me to do, so it often contains large library hardcovers or other things that might squish a little monthly planner. But it survived ok in the bag with the ghost whale for protection, so on to the next phase of actually setting it up!
Image Description: A full spread of the calendar showing March 2025 with a large section marked off in washi tape for spring break (March 24-24) in Oregon.
The calendar itself is a little less wide than I’d like because the whole book is less wide than I’d like (they call it an “A5 Slim” sometimes), but it’s reasonable enough that I’m wondering if I should forgo my usual calendar spreads in the bullet journal and just use this for my daily tracking as well. I find looking at the calendar almost daily helps a lot with me keeping track of stuff so it’s not all just me being started by notifications on my phone, and maybe it would be better to be opening the whole calendar book? I’ve duplicated the calendar for September in my current bullet journal so that it matched my other months, but I’m likely going to finish my current bullet journal this month so I may go the other way and not duplicate in October and see how I like it. I can always change my mind again in November.
Image description: A detail view of part of my October 2024 calendar, showing the BSidesPDX conference marked with some black washi tape and halloween marked with a pumpkin sticker.
I’ve written out a whole academic year calendar through to June and transferred the rest of this year’s “future log” onto calendar pages. I had some fun using a dip pen and some ink samples to add some different colours once I ran out of pens that I had inked right now — I hadn’t even thought about calendar colours as a use for a dip pen but it was nice to have the option without cleaning out a pen.
Image Description: My dip pen sitting on a paper towel beside some ink samples.
As an aside: a recent email missive from the place where I bought my ink samples mentioned their church involvement and made me question whether their values align with mine. A little bit of research says they’re heavily involved with an anti-LGBTQ+ church, so I’ll probably be buying my next round of ink samples somewhere else. Thankfully I had another company I wanted to try out for samples anyhow! But I’m sad to have learned some not so fun pen world gossip as a side effect and now I have a list of brands to probably avoid unless things change.
Anyhow, back to my future-log replacement calendar:
Image Description: Yet another closeup of a calendar spread, this time done in purple ink with a few days marked with purple washi tape.
I’m glad to find that the “regular” size isn’t so tall that it can’t survive in my bag, and I’m *very* tempted to go get the leather cover and actually try using the whole system. I still kind of want the extra width of a larger A5 and maybe I could find similar notebook systems that work with that, but even though I’m no longer much of a world traveller the whole branding of the Traveler’s Notebook just appeals to me. I want to be that person sitting in foreign cafes writing journal entries and sketching, even though I’m more of a “bike to the park and knit” kind of person nowadays. But maybe I could bike to the park and write sometimes? Or take nicer sketch notes at my next conference? Now that I know that it’s not going to feel unreasonably huge, it’s probably only a matter of time before I start grabbing more stuff to match.
For this bullet journal’s lifetime, though, it’s going to be two slightly different sized A5-ish notebooks in a pouch.
I think the next step for using the calendars is going to involve stickers and more colour. I know colours and cuteness will always help me enjoy a system more, but these little boxes are so tiny that it’s going to be challenge to find some stuff small enough to fit in there. I’m glad I had small enough washi tapes already! And the tiny stickers I have from pipsticks that I use as a reward for flossing will fit on there if I decide not to use a separate tracking calendar in the bullet journal. But it’s time to go digging through the stash and maybe figuring out some targeted purchases for tiny colourful things. I did already pick up a 13-day halloween countdown from Stickii that I’m hoping will have some tiny stickers, and I may have to open it starting at the beginning of the month so I can use some spooky stickers right when October starts!
Image description: A stickii halloween countdown set in a black box made to look like a tarot deck with “The midnight tarot” written on it in shiny blue text as well as a clock, ghosts, skulls and decorations. It is sitting on a cyberpunk themed washi sheet also from stickii, and a copy of The Doodle Knit Directory by Jamie Lomax, which includes colourwork knitting motifs for a variety of seasons and themes.
I’m hopeful that I’ve found a valid solution to my “future log” problem and I’m prepared to play around with it over the course of the academic year and hopefully as I blow through a new bullet journal. I’m also kind of excited that I finally found an excuse to find some new-to-me sticker artists, since the artists I support right now tend to make bigger laptop-sized things. (Though I do have space for a few on the planner cover if I can ever decide which ones to use.) I’m feeling a lot better about this solution than I was about both my previous attempts at a future log, but I still expect to tweak things a lot before I finish this planner!
Image Description: Pilot Varsity fountain pen sitting on a pile of purple/pink/brown wool fibre for spinning.
I picked up the Pilot Varsity with a Medium nib at the same time as I got ink for my mystery wood pen, with the idea that for a few dollars I’d have a pen that would definitely work in case the wood pen was a bust. Although this is intended as a disposable pen, people online seemed to agree that it was possible to convert it to a eyedropper pen and refill it, so I that’s my plan. I’m definitely the sort of person who tinkers with things and saving a $3.50 pen from becoming landfill fodder while learning more about pen construction seemed like a nice future project.
Off the bat, it was clear that I was right to pick up the extra pen: my wood pen tended to skip a fair bit and I had questions about whether it was me or the pen. And thankfully the Varsity was right there and ready to go! It wrote super easily and smoothly and gave me a baseline for comparison. With some experimentation using both I could eventually get the wood pen to behave a bit better. But it was clear that the Varsity was easier on my hands and less hassle.
Image Description: My spinning journal with a bobbin of purple yarn singles and a Pilot Varsity fountain pen (also purple) sitting on top of it. The text is mostly boring notes about the yarn weights and how much I spun, but there is a funny note that reads “Hatch may have eaten some of the winterberry” after my dog got hold of something that might have been a stray hank of fibre.
I used the Varsity for my spinning journal during Tour de Fleece. Now, I should be clear: I’ve never been good about tracking my yarn spinning projects, and I’m not actually even sure I care about doing better except maybe remembering to put a tag on the yarns when they’re done. But I’d seen some interesting advice about spinning journals that I wanted to try, and using a fountain pen was mostly a carrot to keep me excited about the writing part. And the pen definitely helped! (I’m still iterating on how I do the spinning journal, though.)
I love the little pen, and it was noticeably smoother and less work for my hands than my previous go-to spinning journal writing implement which was a pencil. It did add at a small risk that I could wind up bleeding ink on my fibre if I dropped the pen or something. It didn’t happen, but I *did* have purple fibre and a purple pen so I wasn’t too worried. Before Tour de Fleece, I’d mostly used the Varsity in my bullet journal which has very thick 160 gsm bamboo paper, so it was interesting to see the “ghosting” on the cheaper A5 binder paper where you could see the writing on the other side.
Image Description: A pilot varsity pen sitting on top of a few daily entries in my spinning journal. The text is uninteresting project notes, but you can see some “ghosting” of writing on the other side of the page. The pen and ink are purple.
I’ve since seen this particular pen actually bleed through a little bit in some notebooks that handled my other pens ok. I wouldn’t say it’s happened enough to be a problem but this particular ink does seep in a bit more rather than floating on top of the paper. I’m not sure if that’s what people mean when they say an ink is “wet” in fountain pen reviews, and I don’t have too many inks for comparison (yet!), but that’s kind of what I imagined as a reader. It does mean I probably won’t go through with my plan of sticking this in my backpack for out-and-about use, but I’m not sad for an excuse to try some other pens to find a good one for carrying around. And please, do tell me about your favourite carry around town or travel pens! I’m figuring out my short list of what to buy and try and love personal recommendations.
I used the Varsity and my wood pen by themselves through May and June before I bought a few more pens in July. For now, this pen is living with my spinning journal but occasionally making guest star appearances in my bullet journal when I want a little bit of purple! The Varsity is a fun little pen and easy to love, and I’m looking forwards to eventually using up the ink and trying to convert it from disposable to something I can refill.
A few months ago, I found a fountain pen in a drawer. It was a gift from someone who knew me as a teenager, when I had tendinitis and used a fountain pen as a way to reduce strain during writing. I didn’t have ink when I got it and I likely forgot all about buying some to try it out after the chaos of unpacking from the holidays.
Image Description: A fountain pen with a light coloured wooden body and gold and black accents. It is sitting on teal fabric with birds and flowers on it.
It’s a pretty little thing, with turned wood. Maybe my friend turned it, maybe it was a craft fair find, it’s been so long since I received it that I don’t actually remember! It had almost certainly been sitting in that drawer since 2019 or earlier. But this time I pulled it out I looked at it and thought, “this is too nice to sit in a drawer forever, I should buy some ink.”
I hadn’t actually used a fountain pen in close to 3 decades. Back in high school, I had eventually recovered from the tendinitis and learned to take notes on a laptop even though this was so unusual at the time that teachers and then professors would come over to snoop and see if I was really taking notes and not playing games. (As an aside, I never did play games as it turns out it was shockingly difficult to learn to learn while typing, but that’s another whole story about brains and learning and habits.) I gave the fountain pen I’d borrowed back to my dad and it’s probably in a drawer somewhere with the bottle of ink I never finished in the 90s. (Now that I’m writing this, I really hope one of us thought to clean the pen. My dad probably did, but I’m going to have to go look next time I visit.)
I assume that a lot has changed in the fountain pen world in 3 decades, but for all I know there were fancy inks back then that I just never bothered to look up because I had one pen, one bottle of ink, and writing caused me so much pain that I was mostly trying to find a way to avoid it. Although I had a couple of friends/classmates who used fountain pens because I went to that kind of nerd school, I definitely wasn’t seeking out fountain pen aficionados on usenet back then. So I was a little overwhelmed when I went to buy ink in May and suddenly had to learn a whole new vocabulary of sheen and shimmer. With some help from the fountain pen community on Mastodon, I chose a small sampler of inks to try and picked up a “disposable” fountain pen so I would have some basic reference point in case it turned out my wood pen was a complete dud.
Image Description: Doodles with a green fountain pen. Most are abstract shapes and squiggles but there’s also a shaggy dog face reminiscent of my grandparents’ dog Mitzi.
But the pen worked! It’s got a little reservoir so I didn’t have to guess about cartridges. I’ve had a couple of different inks in it now and have been using it regularly since May (it’s September now, so it’s been a bit more than 4 months). It’s been a bit of a learning curve but most of it’s coming back to me. I’ve had to learn about how to keep it from drying out, something that wasn’t as much of an issue when I was a high schooler writing pages and pages of notes ever day, but it’s definitely more of an issue for me as an adult who writes a few sentences or maybe half a page. I had to look up pen cleaning techniques in case I was missing anything important, but changing inks and having what looks on paper like an entirely different pen is magical.
But the down side is that the nib merely ok: if you can look at it closely there’s some things slightly askew, and a bit of research suggests that it’s a random mass produced nib that can have very variable quality depending on where it was made. The Pilot Varsity disposable pen that I bought for $3.50 when I got my ink is generally a smoother writer. This mystery pen tends to skip and dries out a bit more quickly than I’d like, and I’m kind of afraid to put really sparkly inks into it because I have no idea if it’s going to clog horribly. (And I do rather want to play with sparkly inks, but I’d rather not spend hours cleaning them out of a pen that’s not suited for them.)
Image description. A fountain pen and its shadow. The pen has a wooden body and a nib that is gold and silver coloured with “iridium point Germany” and some decorative elements on it.
The issues this pen has may be fixable, but I’m not comfortable doing it myself (yet) so a new beginner pen is less expensive to me than my time. I’m trying to pace myself on buying new pens so that I spend at least a little while using each random starter pen I’m trying and getting to see how they work over a month or two, but I can already tell you that this one’s days as a regular journalling pen are likely numbered. I’m currently loving it for adding tiny art to my journal pages (see the tooth below), but it gets frustrating if I try to write more than a few lines with it. It’s only a matter of time before I find a smoother nib that I like better.
Image Description: A kawaii style tooth drawn in light blue (using my wood pen) with a face on it and some lines around it in orange. There are some words from a journal entry visible around the drawing but not enough of them to make a sentence.
I’m always going to love this for being the pen that got me excited about fountain pens again. Thankfully even though it’s only a so-so writer, it’s lovely to look at with the wood and brass accents. When something else takes its slot in my bullet journal bag, it’ll get a nice retirement to the cup on my desk where I can admire it, and maybe it’ll get re-inked occasionally for art and accent colour.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of the Flo Mask and mentioned that I wasn’t sure how well it would work for singing. Well, Wednesday Sept 11 was my first choir rehearsal for the fall season and I brought it and… it actually worked out pretty well!
Image Description: Terri, a mixed race woman, is standing near the edge of a parking lot outside. She has a Flo Mask around her neck over top of a hand knitted lace scarf, is wearing glasses, and is holding a black choir music folder.
I had brought a spare disposable mask as backup, but I wound up leaving the Flow Mask on for the whole rehearsal. The seal *did* pop once or twice so it’s absolutely not perfect, but I think that was happening with the disposable masks I was using before as well it just wasn’t quite as obvious. So it’s possibly not significantly worse from a health and safety perspective, but it was definitely more distracting. The couple of times I noticed it was while I was singing with my mouth in certain positions, so I was probably ejecting more unfiltered air than I would have liked, but only for a second or less before my jaw moved and the seal went back into place. I didn’t have to touch the mask to fix it; it went back with regular movement.
I’m not sure if it’s going to affect the way I sing overall if I have that feedback. Will I start holding my jaw differently? I think probably not, especially as I intend to practice at home without the mask, but I definitely need more than one rehearsal to figure that out.
I was using an “everyday filter” (the less strong of the two filters available for this mask). It’s generally a little bit easier to breathe in than my previous disposable 3M N95 masks, so it was not a surprise that it was also easier to sing in. Last year, the first rehearsal with the disposable mask left me feeling pretty out of breath and while I wasn’t gasping or feeling dizzy, I could barely last 4 bars of singing before I needed a breath. This year, I could manage most phrases but was still a little out of breath at the end of some — that’s actually about normal for me at the beginning of the season because I’m out of practice.
So overall, I’d say this mask isn’t perfect for singing, but it’s probably good enough! I’ll be wearing it for the next few rehearsals and I’ll see how I feel about it with some more practice, but I’m actually hopeful that I’ll be able to use it for most rehearsals this season.
(I’m also hopeful that I won’t get sick so often this season, but we’ll see how that works out in practice. Kiddo is back in school, but this year we didn’t get infected by my in-laws in August so hopefully our immune systems are all in better shape and I won’t have to worry so much about bringing public school diseases to my choir and the seniors’ homes where we sing for the holidays!)
As I mentioned in my post about my cane, I use a Synik 22 Guide’s Edition for travel because of the cane mount point. But it’s far from the only thing from Tom Bihn that I use, so here’s a ridiculously long and photo-filled exploration of what I carry in my various pouches and bags.
I’ve been a Tom Bihn devotee since I bought their Parental Unit as a diaper bag when my kid was a baby, and we loved having a sturdy bag that didn’t scream “only moms change diapers” (this was an ongoing issue in kid gear — ask my husband about the High Chair of the Patriarchy). I’ve bought a lot of gear from them over the years since and like the way many of the parts are interchangeable or work well together, so unsurprisingly they’ve become my go-to for both everyday and travel bags.
This is just a run down of my travel collection, but it’s still a lot of stuff!
Synik 22
My beloved backpack!
A collapsible hiking cane with cork handle attached to a green backpack with a strap intended for an ice axe.
Things I love about this: the cane mount point of the guide’s edition was really the big seller for me, as I described in the post about the cane. The bottom mount points get less use but are still handy for jackets. I do wish I had a quick-release for the cane: it wouldn’t be hard to make one but I haven’t gotten around to it because I got hung up on seeing if I could find matching clips and nylon webbing.
The luggage pass-through is another accessibility feature for me: being able to put this bag over a luggage handle helps me reduce the amount of extra weight I put on my injured leg, and it makes a huge difference to how I feel during and after each leg of the journey. Before I bought this bag I used to use a bungie harness thing but the pass-through is easier to do in a hurry and there’s no risk of sudden slippage. It’s been a huge upgrade for me, and I look for it every time I consider a bag now.
I also find the full clamshell-style zip incredibly useful during packing, as well as the straps inside the bag to hold things in. We often have to pull out kid entertainments in airports and those straps really help keep things organized so I can pull out just the right thing. It also makes this bag a lot more suitcase-like which I find really nice for travel. (Turns out it wasn’t particularly useful for my work commute, though, so my original Synapse is still my work laptop bag, not that it gets much use since I work from home most of the time now.)
I also appreciate the size: 22L is about the maximum I should be carrying, but it’s better if I make sure not to stuff this. I had a synapse 25 as my travel bag some years ago and it was just subtly too big for me. (Thankfully, it turned out to be a good size for a friend who needed a new bag and it’s working great for her!)
A light green suitcase (Luka mini luggage) sits next to a red backpack (Tom Bihn Synik)
Very observant people may have noticed that I also have a second red Synik non-guide’s edition which I had my kid use on the last trip, again so that his backpack would slip over luggage handles. Honestly, I probably shouldn’t have bought this bag but I didn’t know that a guide’s edition would be coming and I was very excited about the luggage pass-through. (Which, again, is a big deal for me as a cane user.) So I used this red bag for a few trips but then promptly bought the Guide’s Edition when it came out and replaced this one. But its found its niche now even if it’s no longer my primary travel backpack and instead has become my kid’s primary travel bag. When we’re not getting on a plane, it’s also good as a day trip bag and my husband will grab it when he needs a smaller backpack than his own monster travel bag.
Packing cube shoulder bag
I have used the packing cube shoulder bag since back in the days when they used to hold all my breast pump gear. We used them as smaller diaper bags when we didn’t need to carry around as much stuff, and they still get used as emergency kid entertainment packs for short trips or for leaving in the car. We have 4 of them collected over the years: grey, blue, green and yellow.
For travel purposes, I use one as my purse/knitting bag. It’s big enough to carry larger amounts of knitting as well as being a kid support unit (nosebleed cloths, snacks, toys). It’s light and flexible enough to easily get packed into my backpack as needed. We typically use them as packing cubes for amusements rather than clothes, since they’re a bit small for even my kid’s clothes at this point.
When I’m out and about at my destination I do sometimes miss having something with a bit more structure, as well as the slightly larger size of my Paradigm purse-backpack. I love the Paradigm at home because a backpack is easier with the cane, but it’s not quite big enough for the stuff I want to carry on the plane.
I do own a Side Kick that I used to use as a travel purse, but I wasn’t in love with it and the death knell rang when my kid got a tablet and it didn’t fit. I did use it for a number of trips before he turned 3. Thankfully it hasn’t been useless since then: I use it as a bag for my bullet journal and it’s great fit for that with organization for my pens and stickers and space for my fairly large A5 book. So I’m back to the packing cube shoulder bag for travel, which is more volume for less weight.
I feel like I’m still searching for the perfect bag here, but the packing cube is currently the best I have for this niche.
Ghost Whale Pouches
I use these constantly even when not traveling! The ghost whale pouches current come in 4 sizes and I think I have all of them in my travel kit, though the super mini is a little dubiously useful.
Here’s the ones I had on my last trip.
My basic first aid kit: wipes, bandaids, meds. Someone on the Tom Bihn forum recommended these locking carabiners for pick-pocketing deterrence, and I added one as baby proofing when my kid was small enough that getting into the medicine was a concern, though I rarely need to lock it now. I carry this in my purse-backpack unless I’m traveling especially light. (I wish I could claim it’s for my kid but I’m the one more likely to trip and bleed all over everything.)
Description: A small first aid kit in a Ghost Whale Pouch. There are bandages, wipes, antibiotic cream, lactaid, painkillers, allergy meds, tums and sudafed sitting beside the bag, and all of these things fit inside. There is also a tiny locking carabiner used to baby proof the bag.
Knitting notions bag: scissors, measuring tape, yarn needles, crochet hooks, stitch markers and scrap yarn. I have one of these in my purse and a nearly identical set in my knitting bag when I’m at home. If you’re not a knitter you may not realize that dental floss can be used as a knitting tool for lifelines and makes a good emergency thread cutter.
Description: A Tom Bihn ghost whale pouch being used as a knitting notions bag. Beside it are scissors, measuring tape, a small black container (for yarn needles, stitch markers and scrap yarn), a lip balm, three short crochet hooks on a keychain, a lolipop, and dental floss.
My personal travel stationary set is new this year. I talked about the ruler/stencil/bookmark and the notebook in previous posts. Previously I used to carry a tiny notebook and a space pen, but I found myself just not using that setup any more since I’ve developed a preference for bigger notebooks thanks to 2 years with an A5-sized bullet journal. I also carried a fountain pen not pictured here. I don’t know how I feel about flying with fountain pens yet, but I *do* know that I didn’t love that particular big-nibbed pen with this notebook so I’ll be switching it up for next trip if I bring a fountain pen at all.
Image Description: A pair of Tom Bihn Ghost whale pouches and their contents laid out beside or on top of them. The larger A5 size has a notebook, pikachu mechanical pencil, animal eraser in a case, Field Notes notebook and a metal ruler/stencil/bookmark from Midori. The smaller case has a couple of gel pens (also pokemon themed), a tiny set of coloured pencils, a lip balm and a lollipop.
Kid stationary set: this is used for amusing my kid when we’re stuck waiting somewhere. We play a game where one of us draws something and then the other person has to guess and draw what the first thing/creature is thinking. It gets very silly. The pen roll is also made by Tom Bihn. It’s got an interesting design where there’s a plastic piece inside to help the pens stay in; it’s actually a little overly sticky and my kid complains that they’re hard to get out, but I’d kind of rather that than having them constantly falling out in my bag. The other advantage of the roll is that it’s easy to tell if a pen is missing. This usually lives in my purse-backpack when we’re not traveling, though I do take it out for weight sometimes.
Image description: A notebook with a lenticular Google summer of Code logo thing, a set of stickers, a rainbow set of washable markers in a bright yellow pen roll and an A5-sized ghost whale pouch.
Battery case: This is just a small USB backup battery for my phone that I keep around for emergencies or for playing Pokemon Go. Having a tiny bag for this is likely overkill but I already owned the bag and it’s handy for keeping backpack lint from getting into my charge ports.
Image description: A very small purple pouch with a very small off-white USB backup battery meant for use with a cell phone.
Key Straps
The Tom Bihn “system” has little o-rings sewn into the bag. The ghost whale pouches can clip to the o rings directly, but I also use a number of key straps so you can pull things out without unlatching them. I like that they come in different colours so I can see what I’m going to fish up, which is especially nice for the keys and wallet (also from Tom Bihn) in my purse but also for the various things in my knitting bag (pictured below but not used for travel).
Image description: A pair of purple and bright orange key straps leading to mysterious items buried in the bottom of my knitting bag. There’s also a narwhal themed knitting project bag.Image Description: A blue nylon wallet clipped to a matching blue key strap. Some American money is visible in the outer pocket of the wallet.
I use my older RFID-blocking wallet when travelling to Canada and miss the clip part frequently! Maybe one day I’ll upgrade my Canadian wallet to something that I can clip a strap too but for a few trips per year it doesn’t seem worthwhile.
Some Other stuff
I bought the clear 3d organizer bag to be the liquids bag for baby shampoo, but nowadays it’s mostly used for toothbrushes and typically gets packed in the checked luggage so I don’t have to deal with security theatre in cases where our legalized bribes (I mean “trusted traveler numbers”) don’t let us avoid that part of things. Kind of overkill but it lasts better than a plastic bag. I did regret checking it when we got stranded in Chicago so maybe I’ll put it back in the carry-on eventually.
Description: A Tom Bihn rounded pouch and two pairs of sunglasses in adult and child sizes. The pouch is purple and sewn from nylon with a zipper opening and a plastic clip on one side.
The pouch pictured above was called the Q-kit (I could have sworn it was the Q-zip though) and is currently on the discontinued list. I think it predates my beloved ghost whale pouches. This is especially nice as a sunglasses case that fits both my sunglasses and my kid’s. This way when I get mine out I can offer his at the same time, which is handy.
Honestly, I didn’t like the Handy Little Thing much when I first got it because I’d envisioned using it in a way that didn’t work out. But I kept experimenting and eventually it replaced my previous charging setup for travel. It fits in the otherwise slightly awkward bottom pocket of the Synik, which is handy if I think I might want to charge on the plane/train while the suitcase is overhead, but mostly I leave it in the suitcase to reduce weight and use a backup battery for charging en route.
Overall
Yup, I’m a Tom Bihn fangirl, and I have a very expensive collection of stuff thanks to being a well-paid security professional with a love of travel gear and bags. But that slowly-grown collection of interchangeable pouches and straps has really helped me have a travel bag setup that grew and changed as my kid’s and my own needs have changed over the past many years since I bought that first diaper bag. I imagine 5 years from now I’ll look back at this and I’ll have a very different setup again, but some of these same components will be part of it.
It feels late in the pandemic to be buying a really fancy mask, but with the prospect of sitting for hours on planes while the US had increasingly significant waves of infection, I decided it was worth trying out a different style of mask to see if I liked it. And I did!
What is it?
Image description: Terri, a half-Japanese woman, is wearing a Flo mask with a cherry blossom decorative cover on it. She is also wearing sunglasses, a hat, and a Google Summer of Code t-shirt and is standing in front of some bushes.
A respirator/mask with a rigid frame and a replaceable filter. I particularly liked that it had a version intended for smaller nose bridges (common for those of us with Asian genetics), as I know fitting glasses can be a problem for me due to nose shape. I also paid extra for the “halo strap.”
I have good disposable N95 masks that I liked, but I was willing to take a chance and see if I liked something else better, especially given that I was intending to spend hours on a plane and in airports to travel so my kid could see his grandparents.
Pain points for me with my existing options:
Straps either slid down my hair or hurt my ears.
Wearing a mask for more than about an hour tended to get kind of gross
Wearing a mask during humid weather (which is most of the year where I live in the Pacific Northwest) meant it could get hard to breathe
Not the most aesthetically appealing
Took a lot of adjustment to avoid fogging up my glasses. Since I don’t need mine most of the time, I often would just take them off
How did it work out for me?
In short: great!
The “halo strap” sits on my head better and doesn’t leave any sore spots, which meant I could wear this nearly indefinitely. It does take a bit of futzing if I want my hair to sit well — I usually pull it over the bottom strap and flatten it before putting the top strap on, although since I often wear a hat (see picture above) it doesn’t matter too much to me.
The short nose bridge option did indeed work for my face! This is exciting, as I have difficulty finding glasses that fit me due to my short/asian nose bridge, so I knew it could be an issue.
The humidity in these masks condenses around the edge (instead of in the filter) and they provide a sponge to help hold it. Wiping out excess condensation with a cloth/napkin helped it from getting too gross. The filter itself never seemed to get that wet, so it was easier to breathe through even in humid conditions.
This was significantly easier to wear with glasses/sunglasses. It’s not foolproof, but typically it only took a little jiggle to fix the seal (unlike before where I’d have to adjust the nose bridge nearly every time).
It still looks kind of dorky I guess, but I like it better than many of my other options.
But most importantly: despite several trips and increasing covid numbers, I did not get covid this summer! (I did, however, get a cold thanks to being around my in-laws unmasked.)
Things that could be better
I really would have liked more colour options. I know you can just put stickers on the harder plastic shell but I haven’t done that yet and I probably would have bought extra decorated front pieces if they had them in more colours. I did get a pretty one with cherry blossoms though!
The condensation was pretty gross at times and the sponge felt inadequate, but it was so easy to deal with by wiping it out and it was so much better than my old preferred mask that it feels silly to complain about it. Still, I feel like there might be room for improvement in the design of the sponge insert.
If you don’t clean and dry the sponge and frame after use they can smell kind of bad, so definitely plan for some cleaning time after any extended use. We’re talking a swipe with a cloth or a wet wipe before putting it away which isn’t especially onerous, but it was easy to forget during travel.
I’m not sure I can sing in it without breaking the seal on my face. This may be an issue for me as I sing with a choir and wore a mask this year since even if I felt fine there was a good chance I was infected with some kindergarten disease. I’ll try it out before rehearsals start in the fall, but if it doesn’t work for that I can always use my disposable masks instead, which have a slightly larger area covering my face.
Overall
I liked this enough that we ordered some in different sizes/shapes for both my husband and kid to see if they like it as much as I do. I’m eager to see how it performs during our very wet winter, but it’s already been an improvement in the few surprise humid days we’ve had in August.
I didn’t get covid this summer while using it for travel, a short conference, and miscellaneous indoors errands. That said, the rest of my family *also* didn’t get covid and they were wearing different masks, so probably most of that was the effect of wearing a mask at all rather than this specific one.
I picked up this ruler to go with my travel notebook. I didn’t use it the way I thought I would, but it found a niche that made it fit perfectly into my travel stationery setup.
What is it?
A metal ruler that also acts as a clip bookmark and a stencil.
Image Description: A Midori Clip ruler: a copper metal ruler with stencil holes in it. The end is folded to make a clip. It is sitting on a larger black Field Notes brand notebook.
I wanted a travel ruler for drawing lines. I was mostly expecting to use it for lines in the knitting charts I was writing out and modifying during the trip. I figured I’d use it for bullet journal type stuff too, such as drawing the monthly calendar I use for tracking.
How did it work out for me?
Turns out that this actually isn’t a great ruler. The stencil meant it felt a bit flimsy on one side as you move it around on the page, and the clip is just barely enough to make a slight bump if you try to draw a line longer than 10cm. This especially was an issue for me when I drew out the calendar I use for a bunch of monthly tracking stuff.
But it is an absolutely *fantastic* bookmark for holding open the Field Notes notebook that I was using. It’s just just enough weight to hold the pages open and it worked quite well when I needed a pattern place marker for the knitting I was doing.
Image Description: My Midori Clip Ruler being used to hold open a notebook and mark a place in my pattern. The pattern is a variant on the Kelpie Etudes charts from Gannet Designs, and it has been written out in pencil. The ruler is made of copper and is holding the notebook open without much difficulty.
It turns out I didn’t need to draw as many lines as I thought I would, but I *did* need to hold the pages open while knitting my shawl for a month during and after the trip. It was also great for just marking my page so I could immediately open to the pattern page I was working on (a bit of an issue as I was working with 4 very similar charts).
It also worked ok as a stencil the few times I used it. It’s very small so it worked best with my mechanical pencil (then I coloured the results with gel pen sometimes). I could probably find ways to integrate these particular icons into my tracking, but many of them are ones I don’t use right now so it’s not super useful to me.
Things that could be better
I feel like there’s got to be a way to design this such that the clip nudges in just a milimetre or so so the full length can be used for drawing lines, but it’s clear that they intended you to use the internal slots for that so maybe that’s on me for using it outside of the design intention? If you look closely in the image below you can see the wobble at the end of the line where I hit the clip while drawing.
Image Description: Close up of the Midori Clip Ruler in use as a bookmark, showing the shape of the clip while the ruler is on the other side of the paper.
The icon choices aren’t super useful to me, so I’m probably going to keep freehanding most of my personal icons. Still, I enjoyed having some of these and maybe I’ll find uses for them now that I have them!
Overall
I was completely surprised at how much I loved this ruler/bookmark!
I nearly talked myself out of buying it before the trip since I already have a few small “gauge swatch” rulers thanks to knitting. But this was significantly better: it’s super small and slender, stays put in the notebook even if I have to stuff it in a bag in a hurry, and as a bookmark and page holder it found a real niche in my life. Despite feeling flimsy as a ruler, it felt satisfying as a bookmark and absolutely stayed put. I’d be afraid to use it in a library book lest I forget it, but it would be great in books I own. I’m debating trying some other metal bookmarks to replace the post it notes I use in pattern books while I’m working out a design.
I’m tempted to get another one with one of the other stencil options because I love it so much and wouldn’t mind having a spare for my larger journal. I just noticed the cat version has a book icon that would be perfect for my book review tracking!
I’m loosely auditioning new notebooks to replace my bullet journal. So I pulled out my fountain pens and inked up a few contenders that I hadn’t tried yet and here they are with the ones I’d already sampled:
Description: A set of 5 notebooks open to a pen testing page showing handwritten samples for 5 different pens in different coloured inks. The pens themselves are sitting on the bottom right notebook.
My current bullet journal (the one in the upper right) is a lovely book from Kela Designs. It’s going to run out of pages in a couple of months (maybe sooner if I keep messing around with drawing doggies for doggust). I really love this journal but it’s pretty thick and heavy (160 pages, 160gsm bamboo paper), and I want something thinner that I’ll carry around more and also something that’s closer to 1 year sized for me rather than the 2 years it’s taken to use this one. My desire for a smaller page count has cut me off from a bunch of the more solidly built hardcovers so I’m pretty much just looking at softcover notebooks this round.
Currently the winner is the one with the ivory coloured paper which is from Rhodia (bottom right). Paper’s a bit thicker which makes it closer to my current notebook than the others shown here. While I wonder if the ivory colour is going to go terribly with my stickers, I think I’ll like it for writing and washi tape. It’s also got a slightly rubbery cover that reminds me a lot of the Pentallic notebooks that were my daily travellers for years when I worked at UNM and could pick them up from the campus store. The appeal of this one is a much smaller page count than most A5 dot grid notebooks. It clocks in at 32 sheets / 64 pages, so it’s way thin and I’m not committing myself to 2 years of the same notebook the way I did with my current journal.
The tiny bottom one is a passport-sized one from Goulet that’s meant to fit into the Traveler’s Passport system. I *love* the idea of the system with a leather cover and ever-changing inserts, but the Traveler’s comes in two sizes and I was pretty sure they were “too big” and “too small” but my brain wouldn’t let go of the idea of trying it out. Thankfully the refill notebooks are pretty cheap so I could try it out without actually buying a cover. The paper is nice, but the size is definitely no good for my bullet journal needs. I’d been thinking about it as a travel journal option but holding it in my hands (not even writing in it!) I took a different notebook on my last trip so… it’s probably not a winner for me right now. I’ll likely toss this tiny one into my purse to see if I use it, and I might try the larger size at a future date because I really like the idea of being able to get some pre-printed calendar notebooks, but I may have to accept that while the concept is good they just don’t have quite the right dimensions for me.
Middle left is my latest travel notebook from Field Notes that beat out the passport to get taken on my last trip. It’s big enough that I could work out knitting charts in it, but I didn’t love it with fountain pens and wound up using pencil and gel pen. Since both of those are less potentially risky for travel anyhow, I’ll likely keep it as my travel companion. But it’s not making the cut for bullet journal replacement outside of that.
Upper left is from Clairefontaine. I got this one to see if I liked the paper, and I do! I also was surprised by how much I liked the wider lines for writing, as they work really well with my thicker fountain pens. I also tried sticking it in an a5 ghost whale pouch (from Tom Bihn) and carrying it around in my knitting bag and found that it was a winner for weight and size. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten kind of hooked on the dot grid thing over the past year and some of my habits and tracking rely on it, so after trying it out for a while I decided to buy the Rhodia notebook that’s likely the winner. But I really like this notebook and I’ll find another use for it!
Description: A set of 5 notebooks closed so you can see the covers. In the upper right there is a thick green A5 one from Kela Designs with a corgi on it. Lower right is a Rhodia A5 softcover in blue. Bottom middle is a smaller brown passport sized one from Goulet pens. On the lower left is a black Field Notes one, mostly A5 slzed but smaller than the other 4. On the upper left is a Clairefontaine notebook with a cyanotype illustration on it, also a5 size. There is a test tube sitting on top of it to help you see how much thinner it is than the green notebook beside it; it’s probably more than 1cm thinner.
I noticed at Powell’s that the Leuchtturm 1917 also comes in a smaller softcover with a smaller page count, so I may try that out in future. Honestly, I might have impulse bought it if they’d had it in a colour other than black. But by the time I got home and looked up what other colours were available, I convinced myself that I should start with the Rhodia that I already bought, so I’m trying to force myself to wait until I actually need a replacement (or they go on sale, I guess?).
Also, look at me with those fountain pens! I went from one pen that I found in a drawer to 5 (although one is a disposable one, and the other 3 are relatively cheap). Thankfully my current notebook has nice enough paper to accommodate me in this journey into fountain pens and pretty inks. I’m having a lot of fun!
