We’re in the tail end of winter according to the birds, though there’s still chunks of snow in the shade and every time we think it might be warm for good we get a little bonus freezing rain. Still, it’s nice to feel the change of the seasons even when it feels like only a tentative moment of warmth.
Three sheets of stickers: cute dragons, large botanicals and weather icons, an ivory covered MD notebook, three ink swatches (Diamine Tundra [grey], Diamine Mint Twist [green with blue shimmer], and Pennoia Selyempezgo [peach]) and fountain pens (Kaweco Liliput, Pelikan Pura, Pilot E95S).
Stickers
Cute dragon-y creatures by Heather Sketcheroos
Botanica pop-art by Maggie Chiang
Weather related icons by Neko Mori Arts
Inks & Fountain Pens
Diamine Tundra (grey) – in my Pilot E95S <M> (although I had the pens arranged differently before I filled them)
Diamine Mint Twist (green with blue shimmer) – in my Pelikan Pura <B>
Pennoia Selyempezgo (peach) – in my Kaweco Liliput <BB>
The pennoia ink was a random sample from a fountain pen order a while ago, the other two are both last year’s inkvent.
New Notebook Month!
After many months, I’m bidding farewell to my Leuchtterm notebook, which I started back in October with the plan that it would see me through the move. It saw me through 6 incredibly stressful months with medical emergencies on top of the expected move, but we’ve made it out the other side and that’s worth celebrating!
Green Leuchtterm softcover notebook with a bee sticker from The Latest Kate that reads “It’s enough to bee here just as you are”
I liked the Leuchtterm notebook better than expected — it was nice not having to write my own page numbers, and it packs a decent amount of pages into a small size. I did eventually get used to the ghosting but I didn’t love it. Still, it’s a relief to go back to something smaller so my journalling setup is considerably lighter.
The new notebook is an MD Paper grid notebook. Cheap and 40-some pages instead of 120-some. I usually prefer dot over grid but I wanted to try this because the lines looked light enough that it would be pleasant, and so far it’s working nicely and they don’t feel in the way. I don’t think I’ve shown a monthly spread in a while so here it is in the new notebook:
April 2026 spread in my journal, showing tracking for my yearly creative goals, fountain pens, a calendar, and a set of todo list spaces.
My monthly spreads have gotten fairly utilitarian since most of my smaller tracking and notes go on the monthly calendar now that I have space for that. I still find doing a monthly tracking of the creative goals is useful, and I’m so-so on the todo lists: I use this page so I don’t forget things that I should do this week but don’t have to be done today. Sometimes everything goes on the day’s todo list and gets done within a day or two so this page isn’t needed. But other times it’s the only way important-but-non-urgent tasks get done, so it’s staying for now.
I don’t keep a separate commonplace book of quotes and instead just write down quotes in my journal. Here’s the one from the book I finished this morning:
A quote which reads, “The galazy is big & we are small,” I said. “It makes sense to help each other, when we can.” – Space Dragons: Cosmic Survivors by Veo Corva
I love Veo Corva’s Space Dragons series. Book two feels especially in the moment, since a lot of it is about trying to figure out what the right thing is that you should be doing, and then doing it even if you’re scared or angry or not ready or don’t know how to make it happen. And as is a common theme across these books, it’s about finding your people. But also it’s about a society where space ships are pulled by dragons and if that’s not enough of a pitch I don’t know what else to tell you. Plus there’s crochet in this one! https://veocorva.xyz/books/ for more.
And speaking of crafts and space travel, here’s how my latest knitting is going:
Time of the Doctor Scarf, a Doctor Who themed scarf with Gallifreyan style circle-text. It has been knit in ivory and dark teal yarn, and there is a a bright orange/yellow batik project bag and a pom pom sitting beside it.
I’m getting close to the end of chart 3 out of 10. This is going to be a gift for John but I’m not sure it’s even going to be ready in time for *next* winter at this rate! It’s one that nees a fair bit of attention so it’s a bit much if I want to read, but it’s been okay for work meetings when I don’t have to participate much (we have a lot of talks on how to use new internal tools).
Notes from March
Ink Swatches from March 2026 (described below)
Three of these inks were new last month so here’s some notes:
Inkebana Cowslip (Yellow) – This was quite usable in good light but not my favourite when it got dim. I’ll try playing around with it in art but I’m not sure I’ll use it for journalling again. I only have a sample anyhow. I’d forgotten how finicky my Pilot Metropolitan CM nib can be about angles, but I got used to it again pretty quickly.
Endless Alchemy Golden Sunburst (orange with gold shimmer) – I liked this a lot more than expected for an ink I really bought to be a fidget. Super pretty while it’s drying. Like most (but not all) of my shimmers it takes a fair bit of pen turning if you want to keep the shimmer consistent, but it’s a nice enough colour even with less shimmer so it doesn’t bother me as much as it might.
Diamine Marie Rose (peachy brown) – A new one from Inkvent 2025. I was kind of meh on the idea of writing with a colour inspired by chip sauce, but I actually really liked this one to my own surprise. Behaved perfectly.
Diamine Apple Glory (intense spring green) – This I’ve had for a while. It’s nice but honestly was a bit too intense a green in this mostly warmish palette which was a pity. Was nice to pull out the eco with the stub nib for this, though.
I might have a post up soon about some pens I inherited from my grandfather that I’m trying out, but I think that it’ll be its own thing!
This was a gift from a friend who said it was more for the fun little bottle than anything exciting about the ink. It’s a pretty cute little bottle and I didn’t have one since I think the only colorverse ink I have is a sample.
Colorverse Black Hole ink bottle, which has an unusual teardrop shaped base. This is the front view showing the bit sticking out on one side. The illustration has a stylized black hole and a little planet saying “SOS” on it.
Love that little picture on the front. The bottle has a teardrop shaped base which I guess makes it a bit less likely to tip over and mostly just makes it interesting.
Colorverse Black Hole ink bottle, which has an unusual teardrop shaped base. This is thebottom view showing the teardrop shape, though it sits nice and flat because of the flat label on the front.
Inside, the ink is as one expects, a pleasant black. There’s a tiny bit of sheen visible in the swatch on the right, and indeed I can see that in my writing occasionally if I look at it under a sufficiently bright light, but it’s more a cute coincidence than a regular feature of the ink on the paper I’m using. Might be fun to try it on the iroful paper to see if it happens more consistently there; my current notebook is a leuchtterm.
My swatch card for Colorverse Black Hole, a black ink with a tiny hint of sheen in the bigger swatches.
I’m not too worried about getting the sheen to show up more, though, since the only other black ink bottle I have is a black with sheen from Inkvent Black (uuuh, Good Tidings I think it was called?). I’m guessing that Black Hole dries quicker, though I didn’t actually test that. I did, however, have some fun painting with it in the margins of my journal.
Some margin patterns in my notebook using Colorverse Black Hole ink on a paintbrush. One side has curly vine-like shapes, the other a geometric zig-zag with partial triangles.
Fun bottle and a nice practical ink. Overall a very nice present! And I think this is the last ink bottle or sample I had that I hadn’t swatched in my collection, so I’m all caught up and there’s no ink purchases on my horizon until the weather warms up, and maybe not even then — I’ve got so much to play with now!
I have done my first stationary order since moving back to Canada! I was looking specifically for a clip for my Kaweco Liliput, which had unfortunately been falling out of my pen case enough that I was worried about losing it, and a couple of extra traveler’s notebooks in the regular size for my commuter notebook needs. I chose Wonder Pens mostly because I liked the Wonder Pens blog, which is a good enough reason for me, and they are at least in the same province. Maybe someday I’ll get to visit them in person, since my kid is very excited about the idea of going to the Toronto Zoo again.
The package came with the prettiest stamp on it:
Wonder Pens Stationary Shop stamp, featuring a scene inside an ink jar with a squirrel writing and a cat reading a book while sitting on top of a stack of books. there are stars sparkling over their heads.
And here’s what was inside:
A set of items from my order: a wide flat case from Lihit Labs, a regular sized traveler’s notebook, a small bottle of stamp ink, a clip and converter for my kaweco liliput pen, a blank passport sized traveler’s notebook with a zipper case to match, and a pretty postcard with a photo of a collection of year of the horse themed stamps on it.
Since it’s what motivated me to do a purchase, let’s start with the clip for my pen.
The Liliput Clip fits nicely and most importantly, has solved my problem. Now the pen clips securely into the pencil case I use for my journal setup and it doesn’t slip out into my bag, the couch, or wherever I’m writing. I love this pen a lot but it was absolutely an escape artist. I decided to go with a more complementary colours vibe instead of getting the silver and I still haven’t made up my mind if that was the right choice (so it probably wasn’t) but I don’t care enough to get a second clip when this won’t transfer to my other kaweco pens. I also picked up a spare folding converter. I already had one of the regular ones and one of the folding ones and I’d been a bit mystified by the folding one because it didn’t make any difference in the kaweco sport — they both fit and have the same ink capacity. But it turns out that if you try to use the old converter in the liliput, the plunger has to be half depressed or it won’t fit in the body of the pen, so suddenly the folding piston thing makes a lot more sense. I didn’t desperately need a 3rd converter but now I’ve got the option if I want to ink all three kaweco pens at once. I do like them for travel because they’re easy to fill and clean in a hotel room and don’t hold much ink, so it might happen!
I’ve been been using a TN sized notebook as a kind of “everything notebook” for work and commuting, and I’d already squashed a few pages when something else in my backpack fell in between them. This happens to me a lot, which is why I prefer zippered holders for my notebooks. I switched to using an A5 “ghost whale” pouch that I already had, the same type I had used for my whole journalling setup for quite a wihle, but it didn’t fit well and I found it unsatisfying. It turns out that the Lihit Labs flat wide case was the right size, so I added it to my order. I also grabbed two spare TN notebook refills, one to use immediately so I could separate my personal and work notebooks, the other on hand for when I filled one or the other up.
My work bullet journal (a lochby TN sized notebook with a TN zipper case used as a cover) slipped into the front pocket of the new Lihit Labs flat wide pencil case. It fits but it it’s sticking out of the top a little.
Just in case you were wondering: one notebook does fit into the front pocket. With the zipper case on, it sticks out a bit, but without the case it kisses the edge of the zipper. I know it’s hard to figure out what will fit from online listings so I thought I’d post a photo. Having it in the front wouldn’t work for me, since I was aiming to keep the notebook from getting banged up in my backpack, but if you’re not stuffing things in your bag in a hurry when you get to the right bus stop, or you just cared more about fitting pens in the case, this would probably work? It does fit better in the inside pockets, though I actually use the inside pocket for a pencil board instead and just leave the notebook floating in the middle for easy “flip open and write” usage.
Inside of the Lihit Labs Flat wide case, showing some pens on the left and a traveler’s notebook pencil board on the right. The latter is also in the inner pocket, showing that it fits snugly but there’s enough room to close the zipper without any difficulty.
Honestly, I could probably do without the plastic zipper case now that the notebooks are protected in a different way, but I like being able to swap pretty stickers into the back where I can see them and it’s fun to be able to “glue” the two notebooks together by tucking a cover into each side of the non-zippered edge. I don’t think anyone cares what notebook I’m writing in at work but it’s nice that I can grab them both when I’m going to sit away from my desk with a coffee for a bit and write whatever’s on my mind. I’ve been doing a lot of writing at work just to organize my thoughts while I’m ramping up and it’s helping with the information overload.
The Lihit Labs pencil case opened to show some pens in the pocket on the left and the same notebook with cover on the right, although the notebook has been flipped over so you can see the stickers inside the zipper pouch. Prominent is one with an animal bones motif (from fireside textiles/tonkai) and some washi dots are visible behind.
Now that I’ve been using both notebooks, I will say that the Lochby refill that I got as a surprise “oopsie out of stock” substitution from The Gentleman Stationer is clearly a slight upgrade over the official TN refill. The paper is a little more resilient against feathering, there’s nice stitching so it lies a bit more flat, I like the rounded corners, and it has a slightly thicker cover. It’s probably not enough of an upgrade to be worth the cost and hassle of cross border shopping, but it was a generous substitution and if I were still in the US I’d probably stock up on them instead of the TN ones.
The passport sized notebook and zipper case were so I could duplicate my “covered notebook with sticker space” commuter notebook in a size that would sit in my smallest purse. Here it is with a little yamamoto ro biki book that I’d been toting around before I got the case. You can see it’s a little squished from use. I use the smallest purse for a lot of trips where I’m going to be on my feet most of the day because extra weight is hard on my body, but it’s nice to have a tiny notebook that my kid or I can draw in if we stop for a snack, and kid’s at the age where people give him stickers and it’s nice to have a pouch to put them in or flexible plastic to put them on because he doesn’t want to lose them. I’m honestly a little miffed that the zipper case in passport size has card sized slots because I think it would look prettier without, but I guess that’s what I get for not actually buying something intended as a notebook cover.
A rust coloured Yamamoto Ro Biki notebook with a stylized tree on it with spindly long branches and round dots for leaves. It has a plastic TN passport “zipper case” over the notebook being used as a cover.
The stamp ink I haven’t used yet, but it’s for this auto-advancing number stamp I got with the intention of quickly stamping page numbers into notebooks that didn’t have them. Unfortunately the ink that came with it takes forever to dry so the process isn’t quick at all and I have to blot the stamps or they take days to fully dry. I don’t know if the midori stamp ink will be better, but since I was already going to be paying for shipping I figured it was worth a shot. I haven’t gotten around to cleaning out the stamp pad and trying it, though.
A close up of a dot grid notebook with the page number “22” stamped inside. You can see that there’s some messy ink transfer from the stamp on the facing page.
I avoided adding fountain pen ink to this order because it was so cold and I didn’t want to risk having a bottle freeze solid and break en route. Thankfully the stamp ink came in a forgiving little plastic container and there were no problems.
Overall, I had a nice online shopping experience, and it was such a relief to find somewhere that would send me “back on stock” notifications for the TN notebooks after it turned out my local dealer either doesn’t carry the dot grid ones or they’re just out of stock all the time and I don’t know which. Hopefully I’ll get to visit Wonder Pens in person some day! And maybe next order (likely when I need a new planner in the fall), I’ll be able to get some ink.
It’s March! Traditionally, February is the month where I used to feel the worst when I lived in Canada, likely because it’s when you’re sick of winter and the dark, but honestly it didn’t seem so bad this year, possibly because I wasn’t in winter in December so I haven’t really gotten sick of it. It’s amusing that the number of people with masks on the bus seems to go up when it gets cold — a nice n95 really keeps the face warm, I guess. Even I keep mine on on the walk from the bus stop some days just for the warmth!
A very fluffy (Eastern) Blue Jay with a peanut as large as his brain stuffed in his mouth. He’s sitting on a wooden railing overlooking my snowy backyard. He was actually even more fluffy a moment before I took the photo. The weird pattern is from the screen door on my patio.
Possibly I’m not sick of it because of the sheer relief of being here and not there, though. As exhausting as it is to live in a house where you can’t find anything because it’s “in a box” and hasn’t yet been unearthed or it’s been broken by the movers’s terrible packing, it’s hard not to watch people’s driver’s licenses get yoinked overnight in Kansas and think “I’m so glad I got out before they yoinked my work permit like that.” One of my new co-workers was aghast that I’d abandon a green card, but I’d definitely reached the point where no amount of getting paid more was worth the risks of being declared illegal at any moment. And then I wasn’t even getting paid more. Though I *did* just get my promised partial annual bonus from the old job so that was nice.
New job is working out, even if it doesn’t pay as well. I like my new co-workers and we have interesting discussions about technology and security. I’m less excited about the constant AI push in corporate land (it feels every single Microsoft product is yelling at me all the time), but I only have to use the parts that have a clear benefit to my work flow, so that’s something. I’m spending a lot of time on the bus to commute and although I miss having more time with my kid at home, I do like having dedicated time where I don’t get interrupted. I’ve been enjoying podcasts, audiobooks, mentally writing stories and just having time to think about whatever. I’m not thrilled to have been hired as hybrid and told I’ll be going back to work 5 days a week in the fall (I definitely wouldn’t have applied for this job if it had been listed as 100% in office) but I’m trying to wait and see how it works out in practice.
This month’s palette was pretty much built around matching those cute corgi stamp stickers.
Stickers
Corgi food stamp stickers – bought in Japantown San Jose but I don’t know the artist/company.
Pelikan Pura <B> – Endless Alchemy Golden Sunburst. I mostly bought this ink as a fidget because of the lovely bottle which is designed to be swirled, but I decided to see how I like it in a pen too.
TWSBI Eco <1.1 stub> – Diamine Apple Glory. I bought this ink specifically for this pen!
Pilot Metropolitan <CM> – Ikebana Cowslip. Accidentally got some green ink on the nib while wiping it off after filling, so this may not be the right colour in my notebook. Oh well!
Pilot E95S <M> – Diamine Marie Rose. From the latest inkvent.
Creative space: My office is set up enough to be usable for work and for writing, haven’t quite figured out the desk situation enough work on painting yet. There are still a lot of boxes but I’ve switched most of them to be clear ones so I can at least find things, and I suspect there’s at least a couple of boxes missing still. I’ve got an initial stationary shelf started (see photo below) but I’m thinking I’ll use drawers for most of my inks and samples and I haven’t decided where in the shelf those should go.
Crafting for the climate: Finished a scarf for my kid and a sweater for me. Still working on a very complicated scarf for my husband, but it’s definitely not getting finished before it warms up this year!
Painting with fountain pen ink: not set up for this yet but I did get some more watercolour painting books from the library so I’ve got some exercises to do once I figure out where the heck my watercolour paper got packed (or give up and buy more; I’ll use it eventually.)
Writing: wrote a bunch of fanfic for a valentines event and I’m really happy with how things turned out. Got a few things in progress and with all the ao3 downtime the past couple of days I fit some extra writing time in.
At the time that I’m preparing this post (a week in advance), we’re still waiting on moving company nonsense, my internet keeps cutting out while I’m trying to do stuff, the furnace still doesn’t work, and the work training I took today got glitched somehow so I can’t finish it and I’m stuck re-listening to an hour of video. But hopefully by the time this posts, everything will be great and this frustrating day will be a distant memory. In the meantime, I have pretty inks and a nice crisp apple to eat.
A view of the “green” space by the power lines, with trees and ground covered in snow and with the sun breaking through the clouds near the horizon.
Let’s talk inks:
A set of 5 ink swatches from the last of the Diamine Inkvent Teal calendar. Day 21: Chaos, deep burgundy with grene sheen. Day 22: Pineapple Spritz, two-toned yellow with yellow sparkles. Day 21: Let It Snow, bright light blue with blue shimmer. Day 24: Antler, light brown with a bit of a pink tone. Day 25: Myrrh the Merrier, rich medium blue with blue shimmer and red sheen.
Showing 5 samples to finish out the calendar!
An ink swatch of Diamine Chaos, a dark burgundy ink with green sheen (although it looks more red and less purple in this image)
Day 21: Chaos. Deep burgundy with green sheen. I think this ink is considerably more attractive than last year’s Sleigh Ride, so it might actually get used. Not in love with it, though.
A swatch of Diamine Pineapple Spritz showing the yellow shimmer in the yellow ink. It isn’t very legible, though.
Day 22: Pineapple Spritz. Yellow with yellow iridescent sparkle. This ink is very pretty but only barely legible in my journal even with a dip pen so it may get relegated to decorative status because I doubt it’s going to be better in a regular pen. It’s really pretty with all that shimmer so I’ve got some hope that it might be fun for painting or filling in tracking squares or something.
A swatch of Diamine Let it Snow fountain pen ink. It’s bright blue with blue shimmer.
Day 23: Let It Snow. Bright blue with blue iridescent shimmer. Absolutely the kind of fancy holiday ink that I wanted out of this calendar. Love it. Describing it makes it sound similar to Brrr! but it’s not a pigment ink so it should be a bit less of a hassle in a pen. And it is a very different bright blue instead of the more moody Brrr! blue.
Day 24: Antler. Light brown. Fairly similar to Smoky Tobacco from day 4 but with less yellow and more of a pink feel to the brown. Also, it doesn’t stink. Basically better in every way than Smoky Tobacco thanks to the lack of scent. I’ll use this one and possibly never open Smoky Tobacco again.
A swatch of Diamine Myrrh the Merrier fountain pen ink, a jewel toned blue with blue sparkle and red sheen.
Day 25: Myrrh the Merrier. Blue with red sheen and blue sparkles. This is the 30ml bottle and it’s completely over the top holiday ink. I expected something more green-leaning for Inkvent Teal and this really reads as blue to me especially with the blue shimmer, so I would have swapped this with day 1’s Celestial Skies if I were Diamine. But it’s a really lovely ink and I’m excited to use it.
Overall: I had fun with this year’s calendar despite how busy my December was! Most of these inks are good additions to my collection: I’m glad to try some pigment inks, I’m excited about a lot of the colours, and there were only a few disappointments. If I’m honest with myself about what inks I reach for most, I’ve got to admit that I don’t really need more shimmer or sheening inks so maybe I shouldn’t get an inkvent calendar next year. If I’m talking purely about inks I use most, I should focus on getting a few more “standard” inks. But if I treat it as an experience, it’s definitely been fun! It expanded my ink collection in a few ways I might not have done otherwise: I was curious about pigment inks but hadn’t worked up the nerve to buy any and now they’re right there — I’m especially excited to try them in art. Some of this year’s colours wouldn’t have been on my radar if I was shopping but they’re going to work so well in my monthly palettes. So I’m absolutely not sad to have done it again this year, and I’m excited to play with these more in 2026!
As of this writing (happening on Monday), I’ve gotten the paperwork done at customs and in theory we get the rest of our stuff tomorrow. We left Oregon on December 29th and had theoretically paid for the truck to get packed and our stuff delivered ASAP, and instead this is more like the time I moved the other way where, among other chaos, my work visa claimed that I was an 11 year old with a PhD and understandably that wasn’t going to fly at the border but without a valid work visa I couldn’t do import paperwork. Le sigh. So now we have a move that has been both extremely expensive, slow, and caused huge amounts of stress and labour that we didn’t expect. But it’s nearly done so I guess that’s something? I’m excited to finally set up my office maybe later this week, though!
Stickers
dinos with shiny hearts (stickii, no artist listed)
doggies with sweaters (stickii, no artist listed)
valentines objects (Neko Mori Arts via stickii)
Katrinkles (from an advent calendar)
Using up some unfinished valentines sheets from last year!
Leaning into the new inks for this month: three from the Inkvent calendar I just opened and one new ink from Fountain Pen Day (November 2025). Celestial Skies is continuing from last month.
Commuter Stationary
TWSBI Eco T <m> – Organics Studio Nitrogen
Pilot Kakuno <m> – Robert Oster Rose Gold Antiqua
Lochby TN-sized dot grid refill
Traveler’s Notebook zipper pouch (used as a cover)
The new part of this is the Kakuno — I was finding that I really missed swapping in colours day to day to make it really obvious where yesterdays’ stuff started. I’d bought the Kakuno to be my purse pen (cheap, light, easy to write with) but it hasn’t gotten used in a while because I was rotating other pens in and out. I’m not sure I’m going to love Rose Gold Antiqua in this pen (I’ve had trouble with it clogging in other pens) but I’ll give it a shot since I’m trying to use up some samples and it is a pretty ink when it works.
The Eco has been working beautifully, and I love Nitrogen’s shine on the Lochby paper. The notebook itself has worked out nicely for commuting — I mostly write with it at work and it’s a mix of work notes, todo lists for home, journal-style entries, and creative writing. I may eventually get a second TN-sized refill to be just a work notebook, but for now the everything notebook format is working well. It’s a little bit less weight, I can get by with the zip case as cover, and I’ll use up the refill faster this way.
In the same vein: the plan is to write these pens dry unless I run into clogging problems, so you likely won’t see these next month!
And In Unrelated News…
I finally went and found a plugin that replaces WordPress’s Block Mode editor. I’ve never been a huge fan, but lately it’s been… hanging? Not switching blocks? Whatever is happening, it’s actually been getting in the way of writing a lot lately. So far this is the first thing I’ve written with the new old-style editor and it’s really helped.
Still settling in to the new house. We’ve prepped a couple of rooms for painting but then the furnace decided it would just sometimes not turn on in the middle of a cold snap, and cold rooms are hard to paint. New thermostat is supposedly coming today and we really hope that’s the problem. It looks like the former owners had some weird zwave kickstarter thermostat that was not great even when it seemed to be working, but it may well be an issue with the furnace itself. Thank goodness for good insulation so we didn’t freeze when it turned off overnight.
Painting continues, so here’s a photo of Hatch who looked at the cardboard I put on the floor and thought “must be a dog bed.”
Caption: Hatch, a black lab mix dog, is sprawled across a cardboard wardrobe box that has been flattened and placed on the floor to protect it during painting. He’s got his face in the sunbeam and is looking towards the window with his head over his paws, while his hind end is sprawled at a “draw me like one of your French girls” pinup pose with his legs stretched out.
And then, immediately, “don’t take my picture!”
Caption: Hatch, a black lab mix dog, sitting on some cardboard with his front half in a sunbeam. He’s sitting up compared to the previous photo and you can see that his front paws are crossed. He’s looking vaguely in my direction with his ears back like he’s not very impressed.
Anyhow, let’s talk inks.
A set of four ink swatches from the Diamine Inkvent Teal (2025) calendar. Day 17 Gala is a bright purple, Day 18 Laurel is deep green with so much red sheen that the green is often completely invisible, Day 19 Overcast is a light blue with pinkish tones, and Day 20 Ambiance is orange with pink sparkles.
Day 17: Gala. A nice shading purple. I really like this one! It’s a little more pink than J Herbin Violette Pensée, which is the closest thing in my collection. I’m pretty much always going to have the My Little Pony song “At the Gala” stuck in my head when I use this, especially since it’s a very twilight sparkle kind of purple.
Day 18: Laurel. Dark teal-leaning green base with so much red sheen that it’s more of a red ink than a green one. I like this one but I do wish it had a little less sheen so you could get more of the base colour, and it is very similar to Vibe from last year so it’s kind of boring in context. Still, viewed on its own it’s a fun ink and I appreciate that it’s a lot more green than all the other pink sheen inks I have. I wonder why I never see a deep red with the pink sheen? Something chemical or it just doesn’t look as cool in product photos?
Day 19: Overcast. A dual-tone ink that’s grey-blue with a pink tone. This one is really lovely, but unfortunately very close to my Fountain Pen Day purchase of Van Dieman’s Underflow. Underflow is a bit brighter and more green so they’re not exactly duplicates just very similar. I’ll use both!
Day 20: Ambiance. A peachy orange with pink sparkles. This one is unique in my collection — the closest ink I have has gold shimmer and despite the photo above making it look more gold, this one is definitely more of a pink shimmer when viewed head-on. I like it!
These are all lovely and will get used, though I feel like Laurel could have been more interesting with less sheen. I think Ambiance is the one I’m most excited to ink up and use in my journal, but probably Overcast and Gala will see more use over time due to the lack of shimmer.
Another belated Inkvent post for swatch Wednesday! I didn’t bother doing inkvent posts in December because of the move, and in theory now that some of our stuff has arrived I could probably be unpacking instead of blogging about ink. But our stuff got separated into two shipments and a lot of the furniture is on the second truck, and in some cases we have bookshelves but no actual shelves so they’re unusable for unpacking. Oh well. We don’t have an ETA yet on the second half of stuff so we’re doing what we can.
And in the meantime, here’s some ink swatches!
A set of swatches from the Diamine Inkvent Teal calendar showcasing day 13 Molten Basalt (grey with red sheen), 14 Mittens (hot pink, pigment ink), 15 Frostbite (dark blue with copper shimmer), 16 Ruby Taffeta (red with green shimmer)
Day 13: Molten Basalt. Grey with a reddish sheen. Normally I’m not a huge fan of greys because they’re either dark enough to mostly look black in practice, or they’re light enough that they’re kind of annoying to read without bringing much joy to my writing. (I like saturated colours!) But the sheen is enough to make this one interesting, and I like the name.
Day 14: Mittens. Hot pink pigment ink. I have no idea what could possibly call for waterproof Barbie pink ink in my life, but I love how saturated and unapologetic the colour looks. This one didn’t stain as badly as Brr! did but I was also a bit more careful about soaking the brush a few seconds after I was done using it.
Day 15: Frostbite. Dark blue with loads of copper shimmer. It looks a bit gold in the picture but its more coppery to my eye. This one’s very pretty and I’d like to see how it does in a pen where the shimmer is likely to be toned down a bit so you can actually appreciate the base colour.
Day 15: Ruby Taffeta. Red with iridescent green shimmer. For some reason the camera picks this up more as a silver but it’s noticeably green to my eyes in real life. This is the red of my dreams, exactly the red I’ve wanted and I’m almost mad that it’s got shimmer because it’s such a perfect red. (Look, I bonded with red pens during my stint as an editor, okay?) This will absolutely get used but it’s gonna be really tempting to not bother stirring it up and using it without the shimmer. Not that the shimmer is bad, but the slightly greenish iridescence isn’t what I would have chosen to go with such a glorious red. If anyone knows of a match for this colour without the shimmer, let me know!
Overall: I love all of these. Ruby Taffeta is probably my favourite, but Molten Basalt may get inked up more often due to the lack of shimmer. I do have some pinks similar to Mittens but they’re not pigment inks so it’s really a different beast. And the rest are all pretty different to what I had before!
Resuming the inkvent posts as swatch Wednesday posts. I took pictures of day 9-12 before I got totally swamped with moving stuff, but I’ll have to take the rest of the pictures in the new house. (I do have all my swatches, though!)
Day 9: Bittersweet. Very bright green, no shimmer or sheen. I thought maybe this one would be a bit hard to read but it seems fine. It’s not quite as day-glow as it looks in that photo but it is pretty bright in the sun. I love greens and a lot of my other light greens are a bit muddy in comparison so it’s fairly unique in my collection. Will get used for sure.
Nostalgia ink swatch photographed at an angle for the shimmer.
Day 10: Nostalgia. Brownish burgundy/purple with pink shimmer. Very pretty, and I rather liked playing with it on the paint brush where it’s a bit lighter than in the handwriting. Not a colour I might have chosen for myself but I’m looking forwards to using it because I think it’s going to fill a nice neutral-adjacent niche in my monthly palettes.
Brr! ink swatch showing the feathering in the paintbrush swatch and some of the shimmer.
Day 11: Brrr! Light blue with blue shimmer. I love this colour a lot but it stained the heck out of my paintbrush. Which isn’t a huge deal (I mean, it’s a paint brush, it was bound to happen eventually) but I’d probably have used an older brush if I’d realized it would be that bad. Maybe I’ll try some pen cleaner or the ultrasonic cleaner on the paintbrush just to see what happens but I don’t have high hopes. It’s a pigment ink so it shouldn’t be a surprise but I didn’t have as much trouble with Carousel and staining. I’m going to be careful to put this into my pens that are easier to clean and none of the ones with clear feeds. I do rather like how the swatch feathered a bit so it looks like frost, though!
Bubbly ink swatch at an angle to show the iridescent shimmer better.
Day 12: Bubbly. A very champagne gold with iridescent shimmer. This doesn’t look too bad in the swatch but the shading makes it go to the edge of hard to read in my journal writing. I’ll be curious to see if it behaves better or worse in a pen. This is another one I wouldn’t likely have chosen for myself, but the iridescent shimmer really makes it pop and live up to the name, plus it’s not like anything else in my collection.
I liked all of these inks a lot, though I’m going to have to be careful using Brrr! now that I know it stains.
Second set of Inkvent inks! Yes, I’m behind. It’s been an absurd month as we prepare to move, with our entire plans getting derailed repeatedly, but most of this week’s news has been good so here’s hoping!
Day 5: Marie Rose. Kind of an orange-brown that shows a bit of black at the edge of the bigger swatches. I wondered why it was names “rose” when at best it might be a really desiccated old rose petal colour, but apparently it’s named after a type of sauce and not after the plant. I actually don’t have anything particularly close to this colour and it’s a nice uncomplicated standard ink so it’ll definitely get used even though it’s a colour I might never have thought to buy.
Day 6: Fir & Fog. Beautiful blue-leaning green with iridescent shimmer. It makes me think more of spruce than fir trees but I don’t think most people think that deeply about their evergreens. Love it. I’d probably get this even without the shimmer; it’s a really nice colour. Plus the name really makes me feel like Pacific Northwest winter, where I see the big Douglas Firs looming out of the fog many mornings.
The same Diamine Inkvent Teal day 5-8 swatches shown with the camera at a different angle to show shimmer & sheen better.
Day 7: Blush. Pink. This one goes on the page looking like fresh nosebleed (look, I was one of those kids and I’m very familiar with what a drop of fresh blood looks like on the page) but it dries pleasantly into a red-leaning pink. I think the closest colour I have is Pilot Iroshuziku Momiji which is more pink and less red. I’ve been struggling to use Momiji in palettes because it’s a bit too bright, so I think the slightly more muted feeling Blush is going to fit in really well.
Day 8: Dream Catcher. There is so much pink sheen that you can barely see the base colour, but it is actually blue. This is fun but *very* similar to last year’s Cosmic Glow, so even though it’s lovely it maybe wasn’t quite as exciting as it would have been if I didn’t have last year’s colour. I had to really stare at them together to see that Dream Catcher’s base blue is subtly more greenish than Cosmic Glow’s (but it’s not as far over as Vibe, also in last year’s inkvent). I have a few other similar blue-with-pink-sheen inks but none of them have as much sheen as these so they feel pretty different.
Dream Catcher and Cosmic Glow swatches showing that they have the same colour of pink sheen but slightly different base colours.Dream Catcher and Cosmic Glow swatches shown at an angle so the sheen is less visible and you can see that they have slightly different base shades of blue, with Dream Catcher leaning slightly more greenish.
Even though Dream Catcher is nearly a dupe and a colour family that’s already over-represented in my collection, these are all very pretty and will definitely get used. If I had to guess, Blush is the one that’ll get used most often because I have wanted a different pink for a while, but I’m really in love with the spruce green of Fir & Fog plus the name will make me think of the pacific northwest winter.
Every week this month I’ve had to completely re-evaluate all my plans and expectations. So I got a late start with Inkvent after a sudden emergency, but I’ve been swatching inks daily since I caught up and it has been a nice ritual amidst the chaos. Turns out the chaos of a house in the middle of packing makes for terrible photography conditions so I haven’t been keeping up with that so much, but here’s the first few swatches from when I was lucky enough to get a day with ok light.
Day 1: Celestial Skies. Lovely lightly teal-leaning blue with a touch of red sheen and gold shimmer. This was amazing in the dip pen — lots of shimmer and the sheen around every letter looks spectacular. If it looks half as good in a regular pen this will be a treat.
Day 2: Energy: purple with green sheen. Looks cooler in the swatch than in regular writing but I really like the underlying purple and don’t mind the sheen but I wish it was a little less intense so you could see more of the purple through it. Since the dip pen tends to be wetter and thus showcase more sheen, I may like this one a lot better in a regular pen. But it’ll be usable either way.
Day 3: Carousel. Red with a very tiny bit of gold sheen that makes it look like enamel paint. I really love it. This one is listed as a pigment ink. I didn’t think to test how waterproof it was but it was definitely harder to clean off my tools. I’ve been looking for a “correction pen red” kind of colour so I’m pretty delighted to have this one even if I may need to be careful to put it only in pens I can clean easily.
Day 4: Smoky Tobacco. Brown with a tobacco scent. I saw someone describe this as smelling like cancer. It definitely made my nose unhappy when I had the bottle open for a bit, so I’m probably minorly allergic to this, or it smells enough of tobacco that it’s brining back bad memories of all the second hand smoke one used to inhale in restaurants and bars before cigarette bans started to happen. Thankfully the smell doesn’t seem to linger on the page and once I realized my nose was running and closed the bottle I was able to write with it okay so it could just be that there’s a bit more alcohol in there than usual and it won’t be an issue in practice. It’s a nice enough brown with a bit of a black sheen on the iroful paper (not pictured, my swatches on Rhodia) and I don’t have anything particularly similar, but we’ll see if the smell is a dealbreaker in practice.
I think of these four, Celestial Skies will be the first one to go into a pen and I might not even wait until the end of the month.
I knew that this month was very likely to go off the rails with our upcoming move, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have hopes even as I tried to build slack into my plans. One of the things I’d hoped was that I’d be able to take a little time out of my day and do Inkvent swatches and journalling as a bit of a meditative practice in the face of chaos. Turns out chaos was stronger than that and I’ve been mostly offline for the first few days of the month, but I’m catching up and getting into it now.
Ink
No ink palette for this month — I’m writing half of my journal entries with the day’s Inkvent ink using my dip pen with the reservoir and finishing them out with whatever pens I still have inked. I might swap inks eventually but there’s basically no colour scheme going on here.
The front of the Diamine Inkvent Calendar, Teal edition. It’s a box with numbered doors on it and each one has a new mini vial of ink behind it. The design features a wintery scene.
I am making swatches of each ink as I go, so I’ll probably start posting those in groups or something if things have really settled down enough to allow for that.
Stickers:
Christmas bears by Kawaiihentaii
Holiday squirrels by Nettle & Twig
Shiny snowflakes don’t list an artist, just stickii.
Other Stuff
It’s been a rough month and we’re only a few days in, but I’m still working on holiday knitting and haven’t started the advent-style knitting I had planned because emergencies took precedence over winding yarn. The house is starting to look like we’re prepping for a move with boxes starting to pile up, and kid’s got a big countdown chain to help him visualize how many days before the end of school I’ve got a cough at the moment that has kept me out of choir, which honestly is a bit of a blessing because it’s one less thing to worry about. But we’re surviving and we were lucky enough to have a friend visiting when the worst went down, so I’m feeling tired but supported and hopeful that we’re making our way through it all.
Going with a spooky kitty theme this month, since I had a pair of good spooky kitty sticker sheets from last year’s stickii Halloween countdown. (I didn’t get this years halloween countdown because I still had plenty of spooky stickers.)
Stationary for journaling in November 2025. There are two stickii sticker sheets with ghost cats, witch cats, then a fall mushroom themed set of sheets from MU and another stickii sheet with happy raindrops on leaves and stuff. There are four fountain pens and ink swatches below that: a Pelikan Pura with Diamine Baltic Breeze (blue with pinkish sparkle), a Pilot Metropolitan with Diamine Twilight (dark grey), a Monteverde Ritma with Van Dieman’s Last Light (purple-blue), and a Pilot E95S with Sailor Mayo Asagiri (pink). Below that are a set of 4 thin washi tapes in blue/purple/pink.
Stickers
Fountain Pen ghost cats by Yudoart (from stickii halloween last year)
Witchy sticker sheet by November Rush (from stickii halloween last year)
MU “print on stickers” (transfers, really)
Droplets sheet by Starriesena (also from stickii)
Pens and Ink
Pelikan Pura <b> with Diamine Baltic Breeze (blue with copper? sparkle)
Pilot Metropolitan <cm> with Diamine Twilight (dark grey)
Monteverde Ritma <flex> with Van Dieman’s Last Light (purple-blue)
Pilot E95S <m> with Sailor Mayo Asagiri (pink)
The Van Dieman’s Last Light is a new sample I picked up from their line of two-tone inks. I actually really like the way this ink works other than the fact that I keep thinking it’s too light to read while I’m writing but it does dry darker as so many purple-ish inks do. It’s especially nice in this particular flex nib, which basically lets you pour out more ink with bit of extra pressure, and a bit more ink in this case gets more of the dual colour effect.
Using the Metropolitan right after using the Maple pen last month has cemented that the Metropolitan is significantly easier on my hands, so my ranking continues to stand.
Thoughts on last month’s selections
Some thoughts on what worked and what didn’t from last month. The architect nib in that maple pen is very fun to use but definitely tires my hands out. Not sure if that’s primarily due to the nib or it’s also the heavier and larger pen. It worked really well with Southwest Sunset except that I’d forgotten that this particular ink leaves little dots that take forever to dry, so I smeared it a few times. I had this trouble with the other noodler’s ink I had as well, and wound up giving the rest of that sample away. I like the colours of Southwest Sunset enough that I’m keeping my last tiny bit of sample but I’ll try to remember that it’s kind of annoying to use even if the shading is super pretty.
The combo of Wearingeul Frankenstein and my TWSBI Eco worked, but it was clear that all the shimmer was getting stuck in the feed and very little made it to the page, so next time that ink goes in the Pelikan to see if I can get a better effect. It is really nice without the shimmer, though, so not too sad.
Using KWZ All that Glitters Firecracker reminded me how much I enjoy their easy to use shimmers that work in all my pens. Since they’re only $10 per 30ml bottle, I just went ahead and bought the two colours I didn’t have. I don’t think they’re as pretty as the two I bought first, but I think I’ll enjoy using them anyhow!
The Pelikan Pura made Diamine Pine Needle work much better than last time I used it. Very happy with how much the Pura improves my ink collection!
The Leuchtturm1917 is working well. The paper definitely is a bit thinner so I found myself rearranging inks so the dark purple Frankenstein was mostly used on the left hand page and I wasn’t writing on something with seriously visible ghosting. I don’t find it too disruptive but it’s there and I notice and think about it regularly. It’s been nice enough for writing, though — not too slow to dry or anything. I do really love the pre-numbered pages and the way the top and bottom have wider margins, though, so the layout is great. I think my perfect notebook would be this dot grid page layout with thicker paper in a smaller page count, but I’ve still got a small collection of notebooks to try so maybe I’ll find something I enjoy even more.
Pen collection changes
Three fountain pens: the first one is a large, teal Jinhao 100, the second a dark blue marbled Noodler’s flex nib, the third a light purple Hondgian M2 that is a pocket pen (as in, much smaller than the other two pens).
I passed 3 pens on to a friend this month. From left to right:
Jinhao 100 <fude>: This one has to be held at a steep angle for the width of line I want, which made it not super useful for regular use since my normal writing angle produced very thick lines. It’s probably tuned for calligraphy? It would have been nice for making cards or something, but I seldom do that. It’s a pretty pen but it really wasn’t working for me, and I have a few other fudes in my collection. My friend is a lefty and it worked better for her, so off it goes.
Noodler’s Creaper <Flex>: This is actually the only fountain pen I’ve ever had which I hated the feel of the pen body rather than the nib. It constantly gave me the vibe of one of those cheap conference giveaway pens that didn’t quite fit together right. No idea why, it wasn’t actually loose, maybe it was something about the shape. But it’s been sitting in a cup because I don’t want to use it, so I’m glad to pass it along where it might get used!
Hongdian M1 <ef>: The extra fine nib in this felt like I was writing with a toothpick, scratchy and too small. Actually, I think I’ve painted with toothpicks that I liked better than this. I’m not a huge extra fine fan, but the other ones I have don’t feel as bad as this one did to me. Could have replaced the nib but I decided it was better to give it away.
I’d intended to reduce my pen collection by not replacing these, but then Fountain Pen Day sales happened and I picked up a couple of cheaper pens on my wish list. A paragon of restraint I am not, this month. Which is fine, my unemployment can cover a few pens and inks if a bit of retail therapy is helping me survive a month of solo parenting and all the preparation for an international move and dealing with job interview stuff. I’m still feeling less burned out as a whole, but the past few weeks have been A Lot.
Countdown time
In other related news: I wound up buying both the Stickii Advent and the Diamine Inkvent calendar.
The stickers were an easy choice: I’ve used most of last year’s, and with my regular usage at around 2.5 sheets per month a December countdown isn’t so many stickers that it’s going to overwhelm me for the year. Unlike the halloween collection, these aren’t all wintery so I used last year’s year-round easily. I love picking out stickers and matching inks every month, and the stickii ones are a bit thinner, smaller and more convenient for journal use than some of the others I get from individual artists. I’d probably like their subscription club too but that one is more stickers than I use per month so this fits my life better plus I get a cute binder to store my sheets in. I use last year’s a lot.
The inkvent calendar was a harder choice: I use maybe 2ml of ink in the average month, so I strongly debated just making myself a 12-sample pack to enjoy over the holidays which would match up better with my ink usage. But then I kind of overwhelmed myself trying to pick 12 colours and the ones I chose kept going out of stock and I realized I wasn’t actually having that much fun with that plan. So in the end I decided to just get the Inkvent set and stop fussing over picking things. It’s “too much ink” but I really loved the experience last year and the excuse to swatch and use a new ink every day. And I know I won’t be sad about having more colours to use in my monthly palettes, since I know I sometimes struggle with finding something to match my chosen stickers. In hindsight, I should have just planned to trade ink samples with my friend and use those, but I didn’t think to do an ink swap until nearly a month after I ordered the inkvent calendar. Whoops.
Not sure how I feel about the sparkle-sheen gimmick for Inkvent but now that I’ve got the Pelican pens that seem able to take advantage of my shimmer inks, I’m sure they’ll get used.
Also, it’s got me thinking about painting with fountain pen inks as a way to enjoy them more. I’ve been doing a bunch of watercolour painting by going through lessons in various books I’ve gotten from the library, and it’s been really pleasant and I’m starting to get some paintings I’m proud of even if they’re just duplicating the exercises. Inks are more complicated pigments than I’m used to using but I can learn and experiment. So ink painting might go on next year’s “fiber goals” though it’s a little less fiber-y.
Speaking of fiber, I skipped out on bigger yarn advents but did get the 8 day Chanukah set from ChemKnits again because I love supporting her videos and 8 minis isn’t too much yarn. I haven’t always knit with these right away because I’m usually doing advent stuff that starts earlier in the month, but since this will be among the yarns I have with me when I get on the plane in December, it makes sense to plan some socks in January or something.
I have to actually plan a few months of projects in advance so I have the right yarns and tools on hand during the move. I usually do have rough plans of what I want to knit next, but it’s definitely different when almost all my yarn and half my tools will be packed and on a truck! So far I’ve got a half formed plan to do Grand Opening with a mini set from my stash, but I’ll figure out more soon!
Happy Spooky Month! I’ve got a lot of Halloween-themed stickers leftover from last year’s Stickii countdown, and I’m slowly trying to make a dent in my ink samples this month.
Journal Stuff
My Clairefontaine Triomphe journal is a few pages from done so it’s getting retired this month. (In theory I’ll use the last pages for ink swatching.) I started it in April 2025 so it lasted 6 months. I liked the blank paper ok but didn’t do as much drawing in it as I hoped. Most of the reason was that I got really into writing stories instead so visual art fell by the wayside, and I’m okay with that.
October I’ll be starting a Leuchtturm1917 softcover book from my collection of paper brands I haven’t tried yet. This one reminds me a lot of my beloved Pentalic notebooks that I used to carry everywhere — slightly more rigid cover, big pocket in the back. I’ve heard mixed reviews on the fountain pen experience but I’ve tested my current set of pens in it (including my two broad nibs both of which are currently inked) and while there’s *definitely* ghosting I don’t think it’s going to be a dealbreaker for me. At my current rate of writing this should last around 9 months which is good because I’m moving and there’s a non-zero chance that my other stationary supplies will wind up hard to find for a while, so I didn’t want to use one of the smaller 3-month sized notebooks this time and be scrambling for a new notebook at a time when my office might be still packed or even on a moving truck.
Front cover of the Lochby A5 field folio showing two places A6 sticker sheets can fit (middle pocket and side pocket) and some ink swatches and washi tape in a smaller mesh bottom pocket. There’s also a short pocket at the top that is not in use, and a horizontal pen pocket (also not in use, but sits above the journals so sometimes I have my pencil or the day’s fountain pen in there).
In September, I picked up a Lochby A5 Field Folio. I’d been eyeing it for a while but couldn’t tell if it would work for me, and finally decided the only way I would know was to try it out. So far it’s going great! This replaces both my green notebook cover and the ghost whale zipper pouch: it keeps my calendar and journal notebooks together and stops them from getting too beaten up when I carry them around in my knitting bag all day. It’s got a more rigid structure so I can write more easily when I don’t have a flat surface (honestly, I rarely write at a desk). And it’s got significantly better pockets for the size of sticker sheets I have (I think the stickii ones are A6). I like that they thought to make the pen pocket be usable even with the notebooks open, although since I keep a pen case and have multiple writing tools going, I only sometimes use it. I’ve had the Field Folio a couple of weeks and things are going great; we’ll see if it starts to feel too heavy once I’ve got the thicker Leuchtturm notebook in there.
Lockby A5 Field folio back cover pckets. A set of A6 sticker sheets is sitting in the half-height pocket with enough sticking out the top that one can see which stickers are there. there’s also a pocket on the side that woudl work for stickers or for fitting the back cover of a journal. The fabric is honey yellow/orange and has a honeycomb texture on it. The stickers are somewhat visible through the fabric.
Stickers & Stamps
All of these are from last year’s stickii halloween countdown. I was tempted to get the new one this year but clearly I have enough halloween stickers for the moment and didn’t need more!
trick or treat kitties from Tiny Yume
More costumed kitties from Moon Attic
Halloween tickets from Asakodraws
Icon squares from Laurelmaeart
Got some black/gold washi tape to go with it, and I also picked up a couple Pilot FriXion stamps to track when I floss my teeth and when I practice singing. It’s taken a bit to get used to how lightly they should be pressed to look their best, but I like them! I have a few others in different colours that I’m not using for specific tracking at the moment, too.
Fountain Pens & Inks
KWZ All That Glitters Firecracker (red-orange with gold shimmer) paired with a Kaweco Sport <b>
Wearingeul Mary Shelly Frankenstein (purple) paired with a glow in the dark green TWSBI Eco <1.1 stub>
Noodler’s Southwest Sunset (orange) paired with a Hongdian maple leaf pen <long blade>
Diamine Pine Needle (green with shimmer) paired with a Pelikan Pura <b>
Trying to make a dent in my ink samples. That Noodler’s sample comes from before I learned more about the company so I won’t be picking up a full sized bottle once it’s done even though the colour is nice. The Wearingeul sample honestly didn’t wow me that much when I used it last year so it’s unlikely to get re-bought either but maybe I’ll like it more this year in a different pen? I think it’s just too dark for my tastes. Unlikely that I finish either this month unless I start using them for painting. (That isn’t actually too far fetched; I’ve been practising watercolour painting techniques from library books!) The Firecracker / Kaweco sport was already inked as kid entertainment for last weekend’s trip.
You might note that this is a rare time when my Pilot E95S isn’t in the line-up: it’s because it’s got a few drops of Aurora Borealis left in it and I’m going to use them up before cleaning and re-inking it.
I’ve been thinking a bunch about my fountain pen collection lately. I’m up to around 25 pens (I should probably count or something) most of which are relatively cheap ones that I got with the idea of trying a specific thing: a different nib, brand, filling mechanism, body material, size, etc. At this point I know a lot more about my preferences than I did a year ago, so as a “new school year” kind of thing I wanted to record which pens I’m reaching for most and what’s working for me right now. That way I’ll have a record for next year when I want to see if things have changed.
Current Top Pens (S tier, Pokemon style)
Pilot E95S <medium> – My most expensive pen and only gold nibbed one. It gets an emotional bonus for being a birthady gift from my husband. I like the odd pockiet pen shape and it has a consistently lovely writing experience although I am afraid to put sparkle inks in it thanks to my experience with my other pilot pens. I don’t think it’s going to inspire me to upgrade to gold nibs everywhere but I’m very happy to have one for the experience.
Pelikan Pura <broad> – SPARKLE PEN! This is my go-to shimmer ink pen now and I’ve only had it a few weeks so it feels a bit weird to put it here but I love it so much. Beautiful turquoise with a Y/snowflake pattern that reminds me of quilts but most importantly I like the grip more than the one on the Twist.
Pilot Metropolitan <CM> – I really like the way my writing looks with their cursive italic nib, which is smaller than my other stub pens. If I could get a few more stubs at this width I would, it’s a perfect balance of fun to write with but usable even in smaller notebook spacings. I’ve seen it marked as a 1mm vs a 1.1stub but I think it’s more like a .7 in practice? This was one of the first pens I bought (alongside a TWSBI eco) and I still love it. Turns out I’m a big fan of the shiny metal look. Often when not in use this one still sits in front of my computer to look pretty (the rest are in a pen cup nearby when not in use). I still kind of want a bunch of the other colours in the retro pop line.
TWSBI Eco glow green <medium, stub> – It glows in the dark, which makes it better than my other two TWSBI pens. This is one that sits on my nightstand so I can watch it glow when not in active use. It’s really taught me that it’s worth being finicky about getting a colour I like, since it’s functionally the same as my other TWSBI pens but I just love it more. I bought this with a medium nib but am swapping in a stub from my other eco.
Platinum Preppy Wa Koi pattern <fine> – My todo list pen. I like the texture of the pattern under my fingers and the fact that the cap seals so well that I don’t have to worry much about it drying out. I don’t really like fine nibs in general but this one is nice and sometimes I want to write very tiny things in the flip book I use for daily todos.
Except for the Pura (which is very new) these are basically the pens I reach for most often. The Preppy and the Pilot E95S are almost constantly inked, the others rotate in regularly as I’m trying different inks and experimenting with other pens. I usually have 3-6 journal pens and 2 todo list pens inked and if I don’t rotate I’d basically never use any other pens.
A tier pens (as in, second rank)
These pens are good and write well but basically they aren’t as pretty so they don’t get used as often. These are the ones that sometimes go in my purse or on trips with me because I like the writing experience but I won’t be as sad if I lose one.
All the “less pretty” versions of what I have in my favourite pen list. So that’s my other TWSBIs (an ECO-T and a Swipe), my Pilot Kakuno and Varsity, my other Platinum Preppy. These all write well and consistently and get used sometimes but I’m gonna reach for the prettier one most times. I will give a shout out to the TWSBI Swipe which has a smaller converter instead of a piston so it gets used more often than the ECO when I’m using up ink samples.
Ooly Duo <fine?> – These are todo list pens that I impulse bought at the book store. They are refillable on the fountain pen side, not sure about the highlighter side. Great for todo lists, I like the colour, and the one I opened months ago is still going strong with no sign of drying out. Honestly, I’d recommend these to people looking for a fun starter fountain pen for planner use.
Jinhao Shark Pen <fine> – Nice todo list pen or purse pen. The shark look makes it especially good as kid distraction purse pen.
Kaweco sport (I have 2 bodies and and 3 nibs in M, B and stub) – I like these and I particularly like how easy it is to clean them and swap nibs, and the very small converters use about a month’s worth of ink at my current usage, so that’s nice. They get pulled out for travel and rotated in as purse pens because of their size.
Hongdian maple leaf pen <architect> – This is a lovely pen but it mostly loses out to the Pilot Metropolitan because I like it a bit better and they have a similar niche. I should probably get this pen into rotation more; it’s barely been used since I bought it.
B Tier pens
These pens are ones I like but have things that irritate me. They get rotated in for specific purposes but tend to get rotated out early because I’m tired of using them.
Pelikan Twist <medium> – Fantastic sparkle ink pen, but the twisted triangular grip isn’t a good ergonomic fit for me so I actually use this with a gel wrap over the grip if I’m going to write for a while. I did finally have a sparkle get stuck in it but it recovered without needing a full nib cleaning. Still significantly better than my experience with the same inks in my TWSBI or Kaweco pens.
Endless Phantom retractable <fude, medium> – Dries out too fast for my regular use. I need a pen that can stay wet for 4 days because I rotate between journal colours, it only consistently stays wet for 2. I may yet find a use for this one because I like the fude nib I got with it, and I don’t have another fude I like except on my dip pen. May just come out on months when I have 2 colours going, or I may accept that it should move down into the forgotten tier.
Monteverde Ritma <flex> – This pen is so beautiful and I love the feel of the magnetic cap, but it is SO HEAVY. But it’s really pretty and while I know it’s not a “true” flex nib I really like the way this one can lay down extra ink so you can have fun with sheen and I’ve had some luck with shimmer too. I should probably rotate this one in a bit more often now that I’ve got a better idea of what inks suit it.
Nahvalur Original Plus <stub> – Good for travel, but this vacuum filler has such a large ink tank that I get tired of the ink long before I finish it even on a lazy non-full fill. Also, I don’t know if it’s a vacuum filler thing but it seems to dry up a bit mid-writing no matter how open I have things so I have to shake a bubble out of the way every once in a while.
Everything Else
And then there’s… everything else. Cheap pens that broke, things with fine/extra fine nibs that I hated (which is basically F/EF nib except the Preppy and the Ooly pens listed above). Most of these I should just give away, although there’s a couple in there that I haven’t really given a fair shake to because they didn’t wow me after one month (e.g. I should probably give the Conklin Durograph I got on super sale another go, I think it was a bad ink combo that landed it here).
Things I’ve learned about my fountain pen preferences
Preferred filling system: Converter. I usually have a few pens going for journal use and use less than 1ml of ink in each pen, so small converters are pretty great for me in terms of switching most of a palette of inks monthly. I don’t have any filling system I hate, though the jury is still out on the vacuum filler.
Preferred nib: I like having a variety in my journal pens so I can sometimes write fast with an easy medium nib and sometimes take my time with a stub. Turns out I like broad and should probably try a double broad. I hate almost every extra fine nib or fine nib I’ve tried, and I now have enough todo list pens, so I should probably never buy another F or EF unless it’s something really special.
Preferred size: I really love pocket pens and smaller pens, probably because I have small hands. I haven’t actually had ergonomic issues writing with bigger ones other than maybe my stupidly heavy Ritma but I definitely find myself wanting to go for smaller and lighter.
Preferred materials: I really love shiny coloured metal. Anodized aluminum, I guess? I thought for sure I’d be more into the sparkly resins since that’s more like my taste in jewellery, and don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty, but I really love the bold colourful metallic pens. Might be partially because resins and whatnot are a bit heavier? Knowing this has helped me avoid buying those fancy benu pens.
Preferred inks: I like a variety, and prefer saturated colours with less black and blue. I need less shimmer and more shading inks in my collection at the moment, I think, and I’d like to finish a few more samples so I have space for new ones in the box I use to organize them (I could get a second box but I probably shouldn’t). I really like smaller size bottles and samples so I can have more variety, so a lot of my preferred inks are just because they come in 30ml or smaller sizes.
Preferred Notebooks: A5 size, smaller softcovers. Ideal size is probably under 100 pages. I’m waffling on dot grid vs blank but probably one of those. I didn’t love the more coated iroful paper for journal writing (though it was delightful for playing with inks) but everything else I’ve tried has been good. I’m currently enjoying the Clairefontaine Triomphe notebook I’ve got going. I do wish more notebooks came pre-numbered because I don’t love writing numbers myself but it’s a minor issue. I’ve given up on indexing since it turned out to be minimally useful and not fun for me, but I use the page numbers to estimate how long I have left in a given book and see if I’m writing a lot more or less than usual. I was previously more picky about the quality of the notebook cover itself because it impacted how easy it was to write in weird places (I don’t often use a table) but now that I have a slipcover and writing boards that’s been not such a big deal.
Special editions: I’ve been trying to avoid getting really into the “collecting” part of fountain pens as a hobby, but looking at my top pens, it’s clear that “pretty” factors a lot into what I love the most, especially in cases where I have similar pens. So it’s good to know that it’s worth waiting for my favourite colour to come into stock or occasionally to splurge on a special edition if that’s the one calling my name. Which isn’t a surprise since one of my favourite scientific results is the “pretty things are more usable even across cultures” one but it’s nice to put it in action for myself.
We’ll see how I feel about all these preferences in a year or two, but that’s where I’m at right now!
Back to school for my kiddo! And I bought the Pelikan Pura to replace my Pelikan Twist and I have zero regrets.
Here’s this month’s stationary supplies:
Stickers
household stuff sheet from Eggtart Studio (via stickii; I think this was an advent sheet)
day to day icons sheet from Neko Mori Arts (via stickii, I think I bought this one specifically because I needed more habit stickers. Currently tracking writing days with these!)
Calendar from Mossy Pine (as usual; I got a whole year’s worth!)
These were the intersection of being a little bit back to school-ish and also having the right colour vibe to go with the inks I wanted.
Paper Products
Campus Diary free monthly calendar (new)
Clairfontaine Triomphe blank notebook (going since April 2025)
Koyuko campus notebook cover
I already talked about my new calendar for the year, a Campus free monthly diary. It worked great with the fountain pen I used for numbers in September so I’m pretty happy with it so far, and I’ve got it slotted into the green cover (pictured above) on the opposite site of my current journal. Because they’re slotted in opposite sides rather than using strings or clips in the middle, there’s a bit of a gap in the centre. I was worried this would be a problem for writing but so far it seems to be fine. I’ll try some ink testing with dip pens on the back pages when I next do swatching.
Three fountain pens and inks: Pilot Elite E95S with Diamine Aurora borealis, Pelikan Pura with Diamine Snow Globe, Pelikan Twist with Diamine Winterberry. The latter two have sparkles.
Fountain Pens and Inks
Pilot Elite E95S <m> – Diamine Aurora Borealis (dark teal, carry over from last month)
Pelikan Pura <b> – Diamine Snow Globe (blue with blue shimmer)
Pelikan Twist <m> – Diamine Winterberry (red with red shimmer)
Since my blog post about the Pelikan Twist I managed to find someone selling the particular model of Pelikan Pura that I’d fallen for with the broad nib I wanted at a sale price, so I decided to jump on it even though I’m unemployed and should probably not be buying $100 pens. But I *love* this pen as much as I hoped I would and it fills a gap in my collection so I don’t feel like I made the wrong choice. The Pelikan Pura anniversary design with the little Y geometric snowflake shape and the pretty teal colour is fantastic, and obviously I’m very excited about having a feed that doesn’t clog up with sparkle. It has a round grip so no issues with that (the way there were with the Twist’s odd triangular grip). I expect this pen will be inked almost constantly since it will likely be my sparkle pen going fowards, and I have a lot of sparkle inks from Inkvent to use. Honestly, this pen jumped immediately into second place in my collection (behind my beloved Pilot Elite).
After this month, the Twist will probably go back to being relegated as a sometimes pen because of the annoying triangle pen, although I’ve been playing with a coil grip thing on it that helps a bit and we’ll see how I feel about it after a month of use.
Back to school! As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve decided to use September as my “new year” because it works well with my kid’s school stuff. So it’s time to bid farewell to last year’s calendar, and set up a fresh one! I’m moving from the Traveler’s Notebook free monthly calendar to the KOKUYO Campus one, mostly because the latter is a bit bigger. (Spoiler: the squares are about 18% bigger.)
Last year’s calendar was a Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar. I love the idea of the system of inexpensive refill notebooks and accessories in a planner cover that stays with you, but I wasn’t sure the slimmer form factor was going to work for me.
Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar with stickers on the front and a zippered pouch attached to the back cover. The biggest sticker is a shiny aurora over a mountain. On the upper left there is a smaller sticker of a fox-person sitting in lotus position with the caption “breathe” and in the upper right corner there is a sticker with a cat sleeping beside a witch had with the caption “today is a good day for getting cozy”
Overall, I thought it was a great little calendar. I liked the textured cardstock cover, and I liked the whole setup even more when I picked up the zippered pouch that I have attached to the back cover and use for stickers.
Traveler’s notebook calendar with plastic zipper pouch accessory attached to the back. In this photo it’s flipped open so you can see the sticker sheets I have stuck in there.
I particularly liked this format when travelling this summer, when I decided to use the blank back pages I hadn’t used for testing pens as the place for travel journal entries rather than dragging my regular A5 journal around with me. The tall-thin format is pleasantly easy to pull out of a bag.
Traveler’s notebook calendar with zippered pouch accessory attached to back cover. This shows the loose stickers I have in the pouch.
But when I’m *not* out of the house (which is most of the time) the calendar is just a little small. I use my monthly calendars for tracking a bunch of things, and while some days there’s enough space, that’s not true of all days when I have more stuff I want to record. I’ve also found that a lot of my favourite “small” stickers that I use as habit trackers take up a lot of space. (The dogs below were marking days that I’d spent time writing.)
A peek inside my calendar showing fairly full calendar squares including some tracking runes, dog stickers, washi tape (marking longer events) and a note marking my last day at Intel.
Since I already use an A5 notebook for my journal, I decided I might as well match it for the calendar this year. Honestly I wanted to do that last year but a lot of the A5 options are Monday start and I thought that might be annoying when Sunday start is the more common format around here. The Traveler’s refill lets you fill in your own days of week. But this year I’m just gonna lean into Monday start. I conceptually like it better so I’ve changed my phone and stuff and we’ll see if I start having off-by-one errors.
So my new calendar for the 2025-2026 school year is a KOKUYO Campus Diary Free Schedule monthly calendar. I should note that although this is a blank calendar, the year overview pages are Jan-Dec still so … I dunno, I guess I could cover the labels or just start in the middle, but I apparently barely used those overview pages last year so I’m guessing it’ll just remain blank or I’ll doodle on it or something. While the book itself is clearly bigger, the layout is such that each day’s square is a bit shorter but wider.
Here’s some size comparisons:
The KOKUYO Campus blank monthly calendar with the Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar sitting on top. The Campus notebook is noticeably wider and the squares are bigger, although not as much as they might be since the Campus design leaves some blank space around the edge and the Traveler’s does not.
I did some measuring too:
Measurements comparing the squares in the Campus blank monthly calendar to the Traveler’s one. Numbers in post below this image.
Traveler’s Calendar: 27mm wide by 33mm tall (total 891mm squared)
Campus calendar: 34mm wide by 31mm tall (total 1054mm squared)
So the Campus notebook squares are about 18% bigger, I guess. I don’t know yet if that’ll be enough, but I’m unlikely to start carrying around anything bigger than an A5 notebook so if this doesn’t work out I’ll likely have switch to a weekly planner for at least some of my tracking. My calendar seldom leaves the house but I carry it from room to room and into the backyard in my knitting bag, and A5 is my preferred size for that.
The Campus notebook is cheap enough that it won’t be a tragedy if I bail on it part way through the year. It looks like I paid $5.50 for the Campus one and $11 for the Traveler’s one, so it’s half the cost but also neither of them is exactly going to break the bank. And yes, I did intentionally buy this earlier in the year to help me resist getting too curious about fall planner launches.
The cover is considerably less nice (thin enough that I will need a flat surface or pencil board to write in this, no pleasant texture) but I have a cover for A5 notebooks that should compensate for the thin cover, and I already own several pencil boards that I use with my current journal, so neither of those is deal breakers at this moment.
Campus Monthly free Diary cover. It’s grey and has a picture of some calendar squares on it.
I’m also curious to see how I like the Campus paper. It’s supposedly decent enough for fountain pens, and although I only use those for date numbers currently, I’ll be using the pages in the back of the calendar for ink testing. I’m curious to see how I like it, mostly for the fun of testing a different paper. Although they do have a lot of other cute paper products geared at students that are quite reasonably priced, and I’m never sad to have options.
Some things that did work well this year:
Thin washi tape for marking longer blocks of vacation and events. I love the way it looks even if it takes up a few precious mm of space.
Sticker “rewards” for habits. I’m amused by how much more rewarding these are than drawing tracking icons.
Switching to pencil for calendar writing. I tried pen for a while but didn’t love it.
Getting a pen shaped eraser so it fits in my pencil case better.
Getting a pencil board and using it also as a bookmark so my calendar always opened to the right page.
The zipper pouch for stickers.
I may keep the zipper pouch for stickers even though it won’t be stuck on a notebook any more (I mean, I could, but I’m going to try having both A5 notebooks in a single cover so it would be kind of in the way).
I haven’t actually written in the new calendar yet (I’ll be setting it up on labour day and I’m writing this the night before it posts) but I’m excited to try it out!
I own a few of the cheaper pens that people said worked for them, and the one that had been giving me the least trouble had been the TWSBI Swipe. But even “least trouble” meant that I could use the pen, but it felt like it was getting a shimmer particle stuck somewhere on the regular, so I’d have skipping and low ink flow and the whole thing felt scratchy and annoying to use. You can kind of see it in my journal writing:
A sample of writing using my TWSBI Swipe and Diamine Wishing Tree ink. There are noticeable dents in the paper where the pen was giving me trouble.
Note that this ink *is* shimmery but I couldn’t get an angle of light that showed the paper dents and the shimmer at the same time so you’re not seeing much of it in these writing samples. This is on white Clairfontaine paper in my current journal.
Someone on mastodon (sorry, I forget who but it might have been @paradoxmo?) mentioned that they liked Pelikan for shimmer inks, but the ones they used were pretty pricey. But I had a Pelikan Twist I’d bought ages ago. So I wanted to know would the feed take shimmer as well as their more expensive pens? I can’t answer that because I don’t have any of those, but I can tell you that it’s worlds better than the TWSBI Swipe, or any of the other pens I’d gotten in search of the One True Shimmer Pen for my collection.
Sample of handwriting using Diamine Wishing Tree Ink. The first two lines were done using my TWSBI Swipe fountain pen and have missing sections and dents where the pen wasn’t working correctly. The bottom two lines writen with the Pelikan Twist pen are ver smooth in contrast and show no skipping or dents.
I don’t know if the photos convey how different the writing experience is between these two pens. The TWSBI Swipe feels most often like I’m writing with a mechanical pencil: lots of feedback, very scratchy. It also tends to get finicky about angles. It’s not consistent: I think it’s happening when a particle gets stuck somewhere, so it’ll write fine for a word and then just choke. But basically it works beautifully for a day or two and then it feels like it’s running out of ink half the time.
The Pelikan Twist on the other hand, writes like, well, a fountain pen, even with the same shimmer ink. It’s smooth and the ink flows consistently. I can leave the pen for a few days without having to run the nib under the tap to get it going again. It is everything I wanted out of the writing experience but had never been able to achieve when using shimmer inks in any pen.
Pelikan Twist pen in red. It’s a pen shaped like a long trianglular “tube” with a gentle twist so the ends are offset by about 1/3.
I’m really pleased, but also confused: lots of people love the TWSBI pens for shimmer, and I have 3 of them all of which eventually did the same half-clog thing. None of my other pens fared better, including the Wing Sung 698 I’d bought especially for this purpose. (To be fair, that one had other problems so I may have just gotten a bad one.) I still don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or if I’m just significantly more picky about my writing experience. The former is entirely possible, the latter seems unlikely given how fountain pen users are. I am rolling the pen periodically to keep the shimmer moving as I write, and making sure the ink bottle is shaken so the shimmer is suspended in the ink before I fill the pen.
For all that I now love it, the Pelikan Twist is a weird pen. I think it cost me about $20 and only came in medium (which is fine, I like medium). I had some trouble finding a converter that actually fit it. The internet said it should fit a standard international converter but nothing I had on hand worked; thankfully the fine folk at Jetpens have more precise recommendations so I picked up something from them and it’s great. (I could also hae refilled the cartridge that came with it, but I like converters better.) I will say that the plastic on my Twist is already kind of dinged up (if you look closely in the photos you can see some grey areas), probably from when I carried my pens around in a pencil case that didn’t keep them separated.
Pelikan Twist pen in red with teh cap off to show the triangular grip section, which continues in line with the twisted pen body.
Unfortunately, the reason this pen never made it into regular rotation when I bought it to try many months ago (because it looked weird and was on sale) is that I don’t love the feel of the triangle grip. It’s not unbearable, just slightly off from what I find most comfortable. This got it most often relegated to “to do list pen” for months while I used up the cartridge, then got it forgotten in the pen cup until my shimmer problems made me pull it out.
But even *with* a grip that doesn’t perfectly suit me, it’s worlds better with shimmer ink than any other pen I own, and I’m really happy because this means the Diamine Inkvent inks I’d been struggling to use now have a dedicated pen and will be coming out significantly more often than they would have if I’d had to use a dip pen with them.
Another sample of writing with the Pelikan Twist fountain pen using Diamine Wishing Tree ink. Again, the writing is smooth and shows no misbehaviour from the pen. there’s also a sticker with a strawberry macaroon shaped like a sea turtle on the same page.
I should note that it’s not *all* shimmer inks that give me these headaches. I’ve been having a delightful time with the KWZ All That Glitters inks in pretty much any pen I try. But my ink collection is very small so it’s pretty dominated by last year’s Inkvent calendar at the moment. Still, the problem was bad enough that I’d been refusing to buy other shimmer inks and had taken the Diamine inkvent 2025 calendar off my plans for this year because I didn’t want to pile up more inks I could barely use.
Anyhow, I’m very happy with discovering that even this cheap Pelikan pen has a feed that takes shimmer better than anything else I own! But I will admit that it made me go look at other Pelikan pens and of course I feel in love with one that’s considerably more expensive and limited edition to boot. I can’t really *blame* companies for making money and no one manufactures exactly the same thing forever, but this hobby can be a bit much with the special editions to keep you buying. Ugh!
We’ve reached August! House hunting is going ok but we’re back in the US while we push offers through our real estate agents. It was a good trip but I’m very happy to have air conditioning again: I had a few days without headache for the first time in two weeks once I got home. I was definitely a lot more irritable than I should have been this trip, but knowing it’s because of the heat doesn’t really stop it from happening. Thank goodness for the city pool and my mother’s house full of old toys my kid has never seen before.
Fountain Pens & inks
Since I have the vacuum pen filled with yama-budo, I made this palette from that as a starting point. I do love a teal + dark fuschia vibe.
TWSBI Swipe <1.1 stub> – Diamine Wishing Tree from Inkvent black, day 9. (Grey with green sparkle.)
Pilot E95S <medium> – Diamine Aurora Borealis (dark teal with a bit of red sheen)
Nahvalur Original Plus <1.1 stub> – Pilot Iroshizuku yama-budo (pinkish burgundy)
We’ll see if the shimmer ink drives me crazy in a week.
Stickers
August calendar from By Mossy Pine
Overly sparkly sea creature ice creams from Stickii (I want to love these but honestly I find the holographic effect hard to look at. The art is cute, though!)
Tiny dessert stickers from Mind Wave (for calendar tracking)
And some small washi tape that my kid would describe as “cyan” because he thinks everything blue-ish is cyan.
Now that I’m back at home, I’m working on some paperwork and pull requests and trying to finish “The Grimmoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association” before it has to go back to the library. It’s been a pretty funny book since a lot of the “what the heck is going on, why are you giving the adults homework” vibes of “my kid is starting kindergarten” are very familiar to me even if *my* kid isn’t a werewolf in a magic school. I should probably work on my resume soonish but I’m choosing to give myself more time without recruiter emails while I deal with house stuff. So next week might be “do new crafts” week instead, plus writing time! But so far today has been “play Breath of the Wild” day and honestly I think it’s as important as anything else on my todo list because I *really* need to work through the burnout and I know games are a thing that works for me.
My travel stationary: a Travelers Notebook monthly undated calendar with a plastic zippered pocket thing attached for holding stickers, two fountain pens and a writing board that matches the calendar. On the right is a red pencil case that opens flat which is currently holding a vial of ink, a zippered plastic bag with a paper towel and pipette in it, a pair of thin washi tapes, and a mechanical pencil (pikachu themed)
I don’t travel as much as I used to, so I think this is the first time I’ve brought a vacuum filling pen on a plane. I picked up a Nahvalur Original Plus last year when I was collecting a bunch of different fountain pens mostly to see what would stick.
This is a nice pen. I really love that the sparkles in the black parts are rainbow iridescent, which definitely sparks joy when I use it even though it’s not easy to photograph. I got a stub nib in it because I love the way it forces me to write with a bit more care to get something a bit more elegant. The wider nib might not have been the best choice for travel but I rarely get much time to write on my journeys nowadays so I’m not concerned about using a full tank of ink or too much paper, and I’ve shifted to using a pencil with my calendar so this is just for journal entries. So I guess the only downside for me personally is that I can’t use it as easily with cheaper pocket notebooks, I guess? It didn’t seem like enough reason to choose a smaller nib. The stub in this pen feels a bit less forgiving than some of the others in my collection when it comes to writing at different angles and starting on an up-stroke, but I can train myself on that.
A close up of my Nahvalur Original Plus fountain pen in the “Lovina Graphite” colour which has a clear ink resevoir and black cap/ends that have rainbow sparkles in them.
No leaks on the plane, as expected. I’ll see how I feel about it after more trips, but so far I think it’s what I was hoping for as far as a travel option.
That said, it’s not really a favourite pen for regular use because it holds too much ink! I’ve been rotating my pens and inks monthly and this pen will last a lot longer than that, so once I put something in it I have to kind of work around that in my colour planning or handle the longer process of cleaning it. Good thing the vacuum mechanism is fun, but I have come to accept that this pen is probably not the best fit for me. Still, it is convenient for travel and I’m not sad to have bought it. This time it’s filled with Pilot Iroshizuku Yama-budo which is at least an ink I love to use so it won’t be too bad to make a dent in it before I get tired of it and clean out the pen.
Since I normally switch between 2-4 colours in a month mostly to keep me engaged and also to make it easier to see where the days switch in my journal, I decided to bring a second pen. This trip’s choice was a Kaweco Sport with a medium nib, because it’s small, has a very small converter, and it’s very easy to clean, so I could bring it with a sample vial of ink and clean it out before flying home. Easy peasy! I didn’t love this pen at first because it didn’t sit well in my previous pen case, but it’s been good in this new one and the tiny converter has worked out really well for my usage patterns of late where I’m writing in my journal a bit less (on account of writing more fiction, mostly). This time I brought another Pilot Iroshizuku ink to go with it, Ama Iro. I wanted something without sheen or shimmer to make life easy.
The Kaweco Sport has become among my favourite pens to clean because the converter is so easy, and sometimes my kid will even clean it for me if he’s bored and on the hunt for something. It’s not a screw, so it’s very quick to push it in and out. This is the older style of converter and it’s slightly easier to clean than the folding one but they’re both fairly easy you just have to be a bit more careful with the folding version. I’m actually tempted to get a shiny blue Liliput or one of the AL sport pens because I love shiny colourful aluminum, but I’m trying to cut back on spending while I’m unemployed so it likely won’t be soon unless I happen to catch a nice sale.
On the stationary front, I didn’t bring my current A5 journal because I assumed (correctly) that I’d get very little time to write on this trip and might as well use the blank pages at the back of my calendar since I’ll be switching it out in September and didn’t really need all of them for ink testing. (I use the calendar for tracking a few things and decided I wanted to bring it on this trip, though I don’t always.) I don’t *love* the slimmer format for journal writing when I’m at home and don’t have size constraints, but it’s nice for travel and I really love the zipper pouch attachment I bought so I can carry stickers around and actually *see* them.
And the pen case is the same one I’ve been using for a while now to keep my pens contained in my knitting bag. I definitely could have just thrown the pens in a zippered plastic bag in the bottom of the A5 pouch I use for everything, but I know the kaweco sport has gotten scratched up a bit from me carrying it so it’s nice to have it contained better in a case. And I really like this one!
Overall, it’s all worked quite well for tracking and journal writing this trip! Now if only I had a bit more time to write…
I decided to be a bit lazy with July’s stationary choices, so we’re continuing 2 pens from last month and just adding in the pen that I had been using for todo lists, and repeating the bunny sticker sheet that I hadn’t finished. I did get some new puppy stickers for my calendar (I’m currently tracking which days I spend some time writing). It’s a bit of chaos here this month as I finish my job, work on writing for a little fanfic event I decided to join, and then do some travel to visit family, so I don’t think I’ll be doing much actual journal writing.
Inks & Fountain Pens:
Pilot Metropolitan <CM> with KWZ Gummiberry
Pilot E95S <M> with Pilot Iroshizuku kon-peki
Ooly duo with original pink cartridge and orange highlighter
Stickers:
Meowashi bubble tea dogs
Stickii books and bunnies
Mind Wave puppies
The Latest Kate elephants
No changes to paper this month either!
Notes from last month:
I picked up an Endless Phantom retractable fountain pen during their kickstarter and it arrived. Unfortunately it seems to dry out constantly, so I’m going to try reseating the gasket (they have a video on how to do this) and we’ll see if I have better luck after that. I spent a bit extra to get a fude nib and it writes beautifully when it writes, but it’s been pretty frustrating!
Trying two new inks this month, and a new book cover for my journal! Also, if you’ve got tips for using shimmer inks better, one of my pens is already acting a bit clogged and we’re not even two weeks into the month, so I’d be happy to hear any advice!
New stuff
I picked up a KOKUYO journal cover for my current softcover journal. I also picked up a KOYUKO campus A5 calendar that will fit in there with it, in preparation for the end of summer when I need a new calendar. I keep an academic year calendar partially due to my own habit (getting a PhD and then doing a postdoc means I spent a lot of years in school) and also because I have a kid in school now so it’s nice to be able to have his whole school year on hand when planning stuff. The cover adds just enough extra rigidity to the setup to make it easier for me to write journal entries when I’m not using a flat surface, which is honestly most of the time for me as I typically write entries on my lap when I think of stuff. I’d previously been using writing boards for this but they tend to slip out so I think it’ll be less hassle overall. The only problem is that it’s just enough bigger that I can’t fit my pen case and journal into the same A5 pouch I’d been using, but that hasn’t annoyed me as much as I thought it would. I don’t think I’ve reached what I consider a *perfect* setup yet, but I definitely feel like the cover is a good addition.
The two KWZ inks are new: Firecracker is another “all that glitters” ink with the very small shimmer particles that make it more like a metallic gel pen than my other inks. I love it so much. BUT I will note that I used another ink from this line in my TWSBI Eco and had a lot of sparkle residue left over in the feed that caused mild problems, so I made sure to use this in a converter pen that should be easier to flush.
Gummiberry is less exciting as far as inks go, just me trying out a slightly brighter purple because I’ve learned that I mostly find darker inks disappointing. I didn’t pick up this hobby to then have writing that I could get with just any pen. I want bright colours, sparkle, drama! But I’ve been having a rough time with shimmer inks lately (possibly because I’m writing more on the computer and less by hand) so I’m trying to enjoy some options that are less of a hazard. This one is nice and I like it.
I picked up a second Kaweco Sport pen with a broad nib (it’s the yellow one) and got a calligraphy nib for my existing blue pen. The broad nib is an utter delight with the Firecracker ink. It feels absurdly smooth and looks beautiful. The 1.1mm calligraphy nib seems to be a bit less forgiving for everyday writing than my existing stub nibs, but it’s kind of fun when I use it right. I suspect, again, that I’m having more trouble with it because of the shimmer ink I’m using — lots of small skipping problems with the ink flow. But I’ve seen a few reviewers comment that the feed has trouble keeping up with the wider calligraphy nibs on this pen so it might not be the ink, I don’t know. I’ll try it on something less sparkly eventually. I like the size of the Kaweco Sport because I’ve got small hands but also because the tiny converter makes it closer to the amount of ink I actually use in a month. Who knew I’d be so into small converters?
Not new but I don’t think I talked about it before: I picked up a Lihit Labs “Compact” pencil case to hold my pens so they wouldn’t get so scratched up (the reason my existing Kaweco hasn’t been in rotation was that it was getting kind of beat up in my previous pencil case). A lot of the pen cases I looked at were very expensive and lots of them were made of leather. I like leather in general, but it’s heavy and seemed likely to get really torn up the way my journal supplies wind up in the bottom of my knitting bag that I then carry around the house all the time. This was reasonably priced and solves the problem, though I likely want to find a thinner eraser-pen thing so it fits in there, because my existing eraser has a bulky little case and honestly I mostly erase tiny calendar stuff so smaller would be fine.
Stickers
purple bunnies from TheLatestKate’s patreon
bunnies and books from PinkPafu via stickii
bunnies and flowers from Dai and Qin via stickii
I think both the stickii ones were from this year’s advent. I’ve been thinking about advents since the yarn ones are starting preorders now, and I think I’d probably do the stickii one again, but I’m less sure about the Diamine ink one because I definitely won’t have made as much of a dent in using the inks as I have the stickers unless I start writing a lot more. But the inks were more fun actually *in* December than the stickers were because I enjoyed all the swatching. It may be all a moot point as work is figuring out layoffs right now so who knows if I’ll even have a job to be spending money on advent stuff, but I find it good to think about these things in advance so I don’t get trigger happy when things come up for pre-order.
Fountain Pens & Inks
Kaweco sport <b> – KWZ All That Glitters – Firecracker
an orange-red ink with gold shimmer. More like a metallic gel pen than most shimmer inks. The “gimmick” is that it’s suppose to need less agitation and it’s true. I find it a lot easier to use as an everyday writing ink.
Kaweco sport <1.1> – Diamine – Pine Needle.
Green that honestly isn’t quite like either new or old pine needles, but it’s a nice colour anyhow. Lots of gold/green shimmer. Was an absolute dream to use the day after I put it in the pen, but I think the feed is slowly clogging up with the shimmer because it’s already getting less fun to use. I’ll probably try to use it more for my todo list/craft tracking and see if the problem is mostly that it’s getting used every 4 days instead of more often, but it may just need more agitation before I try writing.
Pilot E95S <m> – Pilot Iroshizuku – kon peki
A repeat from last month. Still the nicest nib I own and I love using it.
Pilot Metropolitan <cm> (not pictured because it was getting cleaned) – KWZ Gummiberry
A nice bright purple with a bit of shading. Easy to use.
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.
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!
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!
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.
![Three sheets of stickers: cute dragons, large botanicals and weather icons, an ivory covered MD notebook, three ink swatches (Diamine Tundra [grey], Diamine Mint Twist [green with blue shimmer], and Pennoia Selyempezgo [peach]) and fountain pens (Kaweco Liliput, Pelikan Pura, Pilot E95S).](https://curiousity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1000005301-1-800x471.jpg)
The Liliput Clip fits nicely and most importantly, has solved my problem. Now the pen clips securely into the pencil case I use for my journal setup and it doesn’t slip out into my bag, the couch, or wherever I’m writing. I love this pen a lot but it was absolutely an escape artist. I decided to go with a more complementary colours vibe instead of getting the silver and I still haven’t made up my mind if that was the right choice (so it probably wasn’t) but I don’t care enough to get a second clip when this won’t transfer to my other kaweco pens. I also picked up a spare folding converter. I already had one of the regular ones and one of the folding ones and I’d been a bit mystified by the folding one because it didn’t make any difference in the kaweco sport — they both fit and have the same ink capacity. But it turns out that if you try to use the old converter in the liliput, the plunger has to be half depressed or it won’t fit in the body of the pen, so suddenly the folding piston thing makes a lot more sense. I didn’t desperately need a 3rd converter but now I’ve got the option if I want to ink all three kaweco pens at once. I do like them for travel because they’re easy to fill and clean in a hotel room and don’t hold much ink, so it might happen!
