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!
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! 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!
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!
Full Speed to a Crash Landing – I read the second one first so I had some idea of how this ended but wow it was fun to see how they got there. Kind of… space heist crossed with enemies to lovers vibes, but no resolution since this is book 1 of at least 3. Absolutely fun and I’m on the list for book 3 already.
Not many books this week because i was working my way through a book I bought which I actually still haven’t finished — it’s got a lot of grief and I need to move through that slowly right now. And also because I’ve been writing rather than reading.
Picture books
Rosie goes to preschool – meh. I glanced through it but kiddo didn’t even want to read it.
Grandpa Green – a repeat. about life and memory loss and gardening. Beautiful but I don’t think it resonates too much with my kid since he hasn’t actually experienced a grandparent with memory loss yet. He still loves the gardening art, though.
Puppy Bus – kid gets on the wrong bus to school and ends up getting a dog’s education. Adorable and funny.
Good Rosie – not sure I read this one? I can’t remember it.
Pete the Cat’s got class – don’t think i read this one either.
Just Like Millie – sweet, beautiful art. Learning to cope with life via dog.
Lizzy and the Cloud – also didn’t read this one. Usually I try to get to each book at least once but kiddo was really into some other books instead!
Molly & May – a brief friendship on a train. I liked it but kiddo was kind of meh on it.
Library materials returned June 15, 2025. Lots of games & graphic novels this week!
Books returned June 15, 2025. Titles and reviews can be found in the associated post.
Board Games
Gravity Maze – a puzzle game where you drop a marble from a start point to an end point. Cards of different difficulties give you different setups. My kid really enjoyed the easy levels then got bored, which is about par for the course for him on these. We found it a bit finicky to use at first but once we got the hang of how the pieces went together it was pretty fun and didn’t require reading.
Nmbr9 – competitive puzzle game where you place down oddly shaped numbered tiles in order, gaining more points as you stack them such that they don’t have any gaps underneath. Pretty fun, didn’t require any reading.
Unlock – A set of 3 escape room games. We only actually finished the first one. I don’t like that they required an app to do some of the puzzles, but it did have hints in it for when the puzzles were decidedly non-obvious, so that was nice at least. Not bad but definitely the kind of game that I’m glad I can borrow from the library rather than own.
Books part 1
Hyrule Historia – I picked this up for the manga at the end but it’s the rest of it that turned out to be a huge hit with my kid: it’s full of beautiful concept art from the Zelda games up to Skyward Sword. He spent a lot of time pouring over the ideas and coming up with his own ideas about how unused enemies would work and stuff. Plus he generated a bunch of ideas for me to use in fanfic thanks in part to how much he enjoyed this book.
Slightly Exaggerated – kind of fantasy/Indiana Jones vibes. I liked it.
The Broken Elf King – romantasy in a “she’s got super special magic powers” way that absolutely echoes “the chosen one” type narratives in a fun way. Like, what if the author just leaned into the joy of a fantastic mary sue romance? It’s like someone took a teenage girl self-insert and turned it into a real book with better-than-teenage writing, and it just rejoices in it. I had a lot of fun and have already grabbed the next book.
Shifting Earth – A climate disaster/portal fiction book. Hit too close to home in a lot of ways so absolutely not escapism but it was good.
A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation – some kind of isekai thing. Beautiful art and character interactions but not enough plot to really keep me intrigued.
I got abducted by aliens and now I’m trapped in a rom com – funny but I didn’t finish it. Not really the fault of the book: I got excited about writing my own fiction which makes me read waaaay slow because I keep stopping to think about my writing. As a result, my library loan timed out and I decided to cut my losses since I didn’t think I was going to stop writing any time soon.
Bikes not Rockets: intersectional feminist bicycle science fiction stories – Who can resist a title like that? Some great stories in this collection, and I enjoyed the whole concept of having bicycles in everything.
Picture books returned June 15, 2025. Titles and reviews can be found in the associated post.
Picture Books
Bark, George – hilarious. A bit hit with my kid.
What do you do with a voice like that – didn’t read. Neither kid nor I am big into biographies of congresswomen (this was from one of the library’s mystery book bags).
Beloved repeats picture books
MVP: most valuable puppy, Say Hello to Zorro, and Cat Says, Dog Says. I’m actually surprised kiddo chose the last one since I didn’t think he was that into it the first time, but we’ve ready MVP and all the Zorro books a lot of times.
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.
Trying something new: I haven’t been reviewing books because it takes a long time to write reviews on my phone, and I’d been working on reducing my phone screen time. But I’ve been using my computer more to write fanfic so I’m going to see if weekly book posts are more likely to happen now than they were last time I tried.
My books
(first one I own, other two from the library)
Kitemaster by Jim Hines. I accidentally pre-ordered this twice, which probably gives you some idea of how I felt about it. A young woman mourning her husband goes to release his spirit kite only to discover she has developed a rare magical gift, and she soon attracts the attention of some very powerful people… I loved the worldbuilding around kite magic (safety lines! The spirit kites!) and the sky serpents and the poetic legends about dragons and the evil queen and the sky pirates and the race of monkey-like people. Maybe it feels particularly good to me right now because I’ve been playing a game which includes a lot of gliding around in the sky, but I wanted to live in this world. There’s also a lot about grief and cultural traditions around mourning in there, in a way that I had to stop and let it sink in sometimes. In a good way.
Halfway There – A graphic novel about being half Japanese and half American, but mostly it was about finding yourself and depression. Her experience of people’s weird reactions to her being “hafu” resonated but the self-loathing not so much.
The Roommate by Rosie Danan – I’ve read a few from her and they’re all different. I find it kind of hilarious that I felt like this one was less believable than the werewolf one but honestly I love a kind of absurd premise as long as the characters are fun. And they are! Just… I’d recommend Fan Service (the werewolf book) over this one. It’s the most recent one and I think the characters are even better despite the premise being more absurd.
Kid books:
Catnapped is a repeat, so kiddo liked it enough to get it out again. Or he liked that it has a cat in it and he’s got this thing where he wants his allergic dad to fake sneeze for fake cats so my kid is extra motivated to get cat books out of the library.
Bob and Joss get lost – ok but no repeat requests on this one
Amazing Grace – never read it, kid wasn’t interested. (Recall: we get mystery bags from the library and not all of them are winners for him)
Storm Whale in Winter – spawned some good conversations about snow safety but no repeat requests
Little Blue Truck Makes a Friend – kid had fun with the animal noises but was mad I made him read some of this so it was slower going than it could have been.
Charlie Chooses – very cute, lots of dogs, we read this a few times.
Toby – another repeat. cute dog, kind of melancholy story so i was surprised he got it out again.
Board Game
Despite the giant box this is mostly a card/dice game where you build a little city and money based on dice roles hitting your numbers. None of the cards are secret held in your hand, so that was great for my kid’s reading level (he can read but it’s a lot of work and he gets tired of doing it), and the rounds are pretty fast and the rules not too complicated. We may buy a copy of this one.
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’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!
This is part of my series on “best practices in practice” where I talk about best practices and related tools I use as an open source software developer and project maintainer. These can be specific tools, checklists, workflows, whatever. Some of these have been great, some of them have been not so great, but I’ve learned a lot. I wanted to talk a bit about the usability and assumptions made in various tools and procedures, especially relative to the wider conversations we need to have about open source maintainer burnout, mentoring new contributors, and improving the security and quality of software.
I was just out at Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, which is a gathering of open source mentors associated with Google’s program. Everyone there regularly works with new contributors who have varying levels of ability and experience, and we want to maintain codebases that have good quality, so one of the sessions I attended was about tools and practices for code quality. Pre-commit is one of the tools that came up in that session that I use regularly, so I’d like to talk about it today. This is a tool I wouldn’t have thought to look for on my own, but someone else recommended it to me and did the initial config for my project, so I’m happy to pay that forwards by recommending it to others.
Pre-commit helps you run checks before your code can be checked to git. Your project provides a config file of whatever tools it recommends you use. Once you’ve got pre-commit installed, you can tell it to use that file, and then those checks will run when you type `git commit` with it halting if you don’t pass a check so you can fix it before you “save” the code. By default it only runs on files you changed and can be tuned by the project maintainers to skip files that aren’t compliant yet, so you don’t generally get stuck fixing other people’s technical debt unless that’s something that the maintainers chose to do.
Under the hood there’s some magic happening to make sure it can install, set up, and configure the tools. It does tell you what’s happening on the command line, but it’s worlds better than having to install them all yourself, and it puts it into a separate environment so you don’t have to worry about needing slightly different versions for different projects. Honestly, the only time I’ve had trouble with this tool was when I was using it in a weird environment behind a proxy and some combination of things meant that pre-commit was unable to set up tools for me. I think that’s more of a failure of the environment than of the tool, and it’s been shockingly easy to set up and use on every other development machine where I’ve used it. One command to install pre-commit, then one command to set it up for each project where I use it.
I’m sure there are some programmers who are incredibly disciplined and manage to run all required checks themselves manually, but I am not the sort of person who memorizes huge arrays of commands and flags and remembers to run them Every Single Time. I am the sort of person who writes scripts to automate stuff because I will forget. Before pre-commit I would have had a shell script to do the thing, but now I don’t have to write those for projects that already have a config file ready for me. Thus, pre-commit speaks to the heart of how I work as a developer. I got into computers because I could make them do the boring stuff.
Image Description: A photo of the package locker in a US shared mailbox. A label around the keyhole reads “open” with arrows and then says “key will remain in lock after opening door” — it’s a great example of design that doesn’t rely on users remembering to do the right thing (in this case, giving back the key for future use)
Pre-commit also speaks to the heart of my computer security philosophy: any security that relies on humans getting things 100% right 100% of the time is doomed to fail eventually. And although a lot of this blog is about knitting and fountain pens and my hobby work, I want to remind you that I’m not just some random person on the internet when it comes to talking about computer security: I have a PhD in web security policy and I work professionally as an open source security researcher. Helping people write and maintain better code is a large portion of my day job. A lot of the most effective work in security involves making it easy and “default” for people to make the most secure choices. (See the picture above for a more physical example of the design philosophy that ensures users do the right thing.)
Using pre-commit takes a bunch of failure points out of our code quality and security process and makes it easier for developers to do the right thing. For my current work open source project, we recommend people install it and use it on their local systems, then we run it again in our continuous integration system and require the checks to pass there before the code can be merged into the main branch.
As a code contributor:
I like that pre-commit streamlines the whole process of setting up tools. I just type pre-commit install in the directory of code I intend to modify and it does the work.
I can read the .pre-commit-config.yaml file to find out a list of recommended tools and configurations for a project all in one place. Good if you’re suspicious of installing and using random things without looking them up, but also great for learning about projects or about new tools that might help you with code quality in other projects.
It only runs on files I changed, so the fixes it recommends are usually relevant to me and not someone else’s technical debt haunting me.
It never forgets to run a check. (unless I explicitly tell it to)
It helps me fix any issues it finds before they go into git, so I don’t feel obliged to fuss around with my git history to hide my mistakes. Git history is extremely obnoxious to fuss with and I prefer to do it as infrequently as humanly possible.
It also subtly makes me feel more professional to know that all the basic checks are handled before I even make a pull request. I’ve been involved in open source so long that I mostly don’t care about my coding mistakes being public knowledge, but I know from mentoring others that a lot of people find the idea of making a mistake in public very hard, and they want to be better than the average contributor from the get-go. This is definitely a way to make your contributions look better than average!
It gives me nearly immediate, local feedback if my code is going to need fixes before it can be merged. I like that I get feedback usually before my brain has moved on to the next problem, so it fits into my personal mental flow before I even go to look at another window.
It can get you feedback considerably faster than waiting for checks to run in a continuous integration system. If you’re lucky, a system like github actions can get you feedback within a few minutes on quick linter-style checks, but if the system is backed up it or if you’re a new contributor to a project and someone has to approve things before they run (to make sure you’re not just running a cryptominer or other malicious code in their test system!), it can take hours or days to get feedback. Being able to fix things before the tests run can save a lot of time!
As a project maintainer:
Letting me configure the linters and pre-checks I want in one place instead of multiple config files is pretty fantastic and keeps the root directory of my project a lot less full of crap.
It virtually eliminates problems where someone uses a tool subtly differently than I do. If you’re not an open source project maintainer who works with random people on the internet you may not realize how much of a hassle it is helping people configure multiple development tools, but let me tell you, it’s a whole lot easier to just tell them to use pre-commit.
Endlessly helping people get started and answering the same questions over and over can be surprisingly draining! It’s one of the things we really watch for in Google Summer of Code when trying to make sure our mentors don’t burn out. Anything I can do that makes life easier for contributors and mentors and avoid repetitive conversations has an outsized value in my toolkit.
Being able to run exactly the same stuff in our continuous integration/test system means even if my contributors know nothing about it, I still get the benefits of those checks happening before I do my code review.
It saves me a lot of time back-and-forth with contributors asking for fixes so it lets me get their code merged faster. A nicer experience for all of us!
I can usually configure which files need to be skipped, so it can help us upgrade our code quality slowly. Or I can use it as a nudge to encourage people changing a file to also fix minor issues if I so desire.
What gets run with pre-commit will obviously depend on the project, but I think it’s probably helpful to give you an idea of what I run. I talked about using black, the python code formatter in a previous best practices post. For my work open source project, it’s only one of several code quality linters we use. We also use pyupgrade to help us be forward-compatibile with python syntaxes, bandit to help us find python security issues, gitlint to help us provide consistency in commit messages (we use the conventional commits format rules), and mypy to help us slowly add static typing to our code base.
Usually before installing a new pre-commit hook, I make sure all files will pass the checks (and disable scanning of files that won’t). Some tools are pretty good at a slow upgrade if you so desire. One such tool for us as been interrogate, which prompts people to add docstrings — I have it set up with a threshold so the files will pass. The output when pre-commit runs generates a report with red segments in it if there’s missing docstrings for some functions, even if the check passes so you don’t have to fix them. Sometimes that means someone working in that file will go ahead and fix those interrogate warnings while they’re working on their bugs, and that’s incredibly nice.
I’ll probably talk about some of these tools more later on in this best practices in practice series, but that should give you some hints of things you might run in pre-commit if you don’t already have your own list of code quality tools!
Summary
Pre-commit is a useful tool to help maintain code quality (and potentially security!) and it can be used to slowly improve over time.
I only found out about pre-commit because someone else told me and I’m happy to spread the word. I don’t think tools like pre-commit attract evangelists the way some other code-adjacent tools do, and it’s certainly not the sort of thing I learned about when I learned to code, when I got involved in opens source initially, or even when I was in university (which was long after I learned to code and got into open source). I’m sure it’s not the only tool in this category, but it’s the one I use and I like it enough that I haven’t felt a need to shop around for alternatives. I don’t know if it’s better for python than for other languages, but I love it enough that I could see myself contributing to make it work in other environments as needed, or finding similar tools now that I know this is an option.
As a project maintainer, I feel like it helps improve the experience both for new contributors who can use it to help guide them to submit code I’ll be able to merge, and for experienced contributors and mentors who then don’t have to spend as much time helping people get started and dealing with minor code nitpicks during code reviews. As an open source security researcher, I feel like it’s a pretty powerful tool to help improve code quality and security with easy feedback to developers before we even get to the manual code review stage. As a developer, I like that it helps me follow any project’s best practices and gives me feedback so I can fix things before another human even sees my code.
I hope other people will have similar good experiences with pre-commit!
It was likely inevitable that I’d start thinking seriously about having some travel-specific fountain pens. I’m no longer the world traveller I was in my 20s when writing papers and going to conferences to present them was a key part of my job, but I have a certain amount of travel-specific stuff in my life. (I’ve been cataloguing and reviewing some of my favourite travel gear here on the blog.)
Image description: My travel stationery setup: Field Notes notebook, Pikachu mechanical pencil & 2 pikachu gel pens from Zebra, Platinum Preppy Wa with koi, Pilot Kakuno in purple, a teensy pencil crayon set, an eraser in a orange case with ears, Burt’s Bees lip balm, a Fisher space pen, Lanisoh lanolin, all packaged with two Tom Bihn ghost whale pouches and a key strap to clip them into my bag.
For pens, I didn’t want to have something that only got used a few times per year, so I decided my travel pen(s) would need to do double-duty in my backpack for out and about jotting down of notes and doodling in restaurants/airports/cars to keep my kid amused. The picture above shows my travel setup except that I forgot to include the Traveler’s Notebook calendar that I’m currently using for tracking headaches, etc. Sometimes I carry all of that in my backpack, sometimes I slim it down and only carry the pencil and eraser, depending on how much I expect to be on my feet vs sitting. Most of this I already had for my summer trip, the fountain pens are the only part that’s actually new.
Before making any decisions on fountain pens, I read up on a lot of really solid recommendations on types of fountain pens that tend to be better for travel:
Vacuum filling and Japanese-style eyedropper pens are less likely to leak in flights despite their larger capacity.
Smaller pocket pens could be lighter for toting around, and might be less of a mess in case of a pensplosion because they had less ink.
Finer nibs use less ink, if you need what you’ve got to last.
And then some tips for just travelling with what you’ve got:
Travelling with a full pen or a fully empty one both made air pressure changes less risky.
Having pens nib-up during flight would reduce risk of ink blooping out since air could escape more easily.
Having the option to use cartridges instead of bottle-filling could be convenient and less messy.
I’m really not sure about the cartridge thing — sure, it’s convenient on the way out, but for short trips I’m highly unlikely to finish a cartridge and there’s no way to stopper most of them, so I felt like I’d still be stuck flying with an open reservoir on the way home. But I guess it works for some people who either write more or are more willing to throw away a half-filled cartridge than I am?
After much internal debate and online shopping, I decided I wasn’t ready to buy a more expensive vacuum filling pen (yet) or even a nicer “sport” or “pocket” pen. I felt like buying an expensive pen would undercut my plan for handing this to my kid for distraction and doodles. But I also hadn’t loved my existing stub-nibbed pens with my travel notebook so I didn’t want to just travel with what I had again. So I went the $10-15 starter pen route instead for my trip to Google Summer of Code mentor summit in October.
Pilot Kakuno
First on my travel list was a Pilot Kakuno. I already had the converter for this since I’d intended to try it in my Pilot Metropolitan eventually. I went with the medium nib for personal ergonomics reasons and also because I was still fussing with the Metropolitan CM nib so this gave me an excuse to use the medium and have the option to swap them later if I never got the hang of the CM. The CM and are are getting along fine now, but I did this purchase earlier in September before I was reasonably confident with it. The medium is significantly less fussy than the CM, so much so that my kid and I didn’t have much difficulty drawing stuff with it.
Image Description: A doodle of a Corgi ready to dig in to a plate of bacon and eggs with a fork and a knife. This was a quick copy of some cute artwork we bought in San Jose Japantown.
I really like this pen. Since it’s plastic, it feels absurdly light compared to the Metropolitan, and that was absolutely a feature rather than a drawback for a pen I intend to carry a lot. The medium nib is more user-friendly than the CM (not that CM would have been an option on this pen, just that it’s what I was used to). I chose better on my ink, which also helped. I’ve got Jaques Herbin Violette Pensée in there because it matched nicely and because I knew I’d want a purple ink in my October planner palette anyhow.
Image Description: Pilot Kakuno pen disassembled to show the CON-40 converter I’m using and the fact that after the trip I’ve got more than 1/3 of a tank of ink left.
The CON-40 converter that I have is pretty small (it’s one of the big complaints about it), but for a weekend trip with two pens getting rotated this was more than enough. And having a smaller reservoir does mean less risk in case of total pen failure at altitude.
Platinum Preppy Wa
Second was a Platinum Preppy Wa. I could have chosen a cheaper, less fancy edition of the Preppy, but then I wouldn’t be me. (It wasn’t that much more expensive anyhow.) It also amuses me greatly that this is the “Wa” edition as my kid decided when he was learning to speak that “wa time” was his term for nursing, so I spent quite a lot of time hearing that syllable even though it’s obviously a different word. Add on the “Koi no Taki-Nobori” fishy pattern being associated with the koi banners flown for children’s day and, well, clearly this particular pen was the one for me.
Image Description: Platinum Preppy Wa Koi no Taki-Nobori version with koi fish in silver on a dark blue barrel. The cap is off so you can see the spring mechanism a bit more clearly.
Like the Kakuno, the Preppy Wa feels absurdly light compared to the others in my collection and that’s a definite advantage for my purposes. I got a fine rather than medium nib so this would be different (and also because it’s what was in stock) and while I definitely don’t love the fine nib as much for writing, I was really happy to have it for drawing:
Image Description: My drawing of a Western Conifer Seed Bug, done mostly in fountain pen with some pencil for shading.Image Description: A Western Conifer Seed Bug sitting on a green poinsettia leaf. It’s a large elongated shield-shaped bug with long antennae and a pattern on the back that looks like a sketch of a mountain range.
The fine nib is also undeniably nice in my smaller travel notebook and on my calendar, though I mostly use pencil in the calendar anyhow.
I also was amused to see that the patented cap design mentioned in their ad copy includes a spring that’s pleasantly visible through the clear plastic cap, so I can watch it clip into place. Very satisfying. The artwork on the barrel is also raised and textured. I find it pleasant to touch but I do worry that it may get rubbed off over time. I guess I could make/find a sleeve for it?
I don’t own a converter for the Preppy Wa and I’m currently planning to try refilling the cartridge with a syringe. I don’t know that I’d feel super comfortable flying with a cartridge that had been refilled many times (I assume after a while they probably wouldn’t seal as well against the nib) so I’ll likely either buy a converter or a fresh cartridge for the next plane flight. We’ll see how I feel about it once I’ve actually tried a refill.
Flying with the pens
I tried to learn from my experience flying with the TWSBI Eco-T where I did have a leak, so I was more careful about making sure that I tightened the piston before my pens were packed, which probably helped. I also moved things around in my bag so my ebook reader (which I always pull out before takeoff) was sitting next to the pens so I wouldn’t forget to move them to be upright.
I flew to California with the Kakuno very full of purple ink using the converter and the Preppy Wa without a cartridge installed. I managed to put the Kakuno in my pen case upside down, so I flew with it nib *down* (pretty much the least recommended position) instead of the nib-up that I’d planned, but I suffered no leaks anyhow. Though the idea of making sure the air is at the top for pressure changes makes some sense, this makes me wonder how much it really matters in a modern pen. There are ball bearings in that converter to limit flow when it’s nib-down, for example, so my particular setup may not have been hugely different than a ballpoint when nib down. If you’ve ever heard of someone doing a proper scientific experiment on fountain pen orientation vs leakage in flight, I’d love to know about it! (If I had a lot of pens and a pressure pot I’ll bet I could design something…)
I flew back with the Kakuno less full and the Preppy Wa with the original black cartridge installed. This time I was a bit more careful about my pen orientation so they both flew tip up, and again no leaks. Yay!
Image Description: A Platinum Preppy Wa (Koi pattern) and Pilot Kakuno (purple) sitting on my notebook, which is open to a page with info about the Clapotis shawl I’ve started knitting, written in purple ink. The notebook is being held open with help from a brass clip/stencil ruler from Midori
In conclusion…
Both pens worked out great for writing, drawing, and even for amusing my kid. They both flew with no leaks and have tootled around town in my backpack being useful with no incidents before and after the trip. They weigh hardly anything because they’re plastic.
One mild surprise was that I used a lot more ink in the Kakuno than I expected, largely because I wrote more than expected. That does give me an excuse to look at pens with larger reservoirs if I’m planning to be gone for more than week or if I expect to take more notes. But with a larger reservoir would come more weight, so a vacuum filler might wind up in a different niche in my collection — airline travel and journalling at home rather than airline travel and backpack pen.
Though I still do want to try some fancier pens, I don’t feel like I need to get a vacuum filler or japanese eyedropper before I jump on a plane again. With the magic of zipped plastic bags I don’t really feel worried about taking these two on a plane. I don’t really expect leaks, but no harm in being cautious.
In short, these worked out well for both air travel and around town use! Almost too well because now I have less excuse to buy more pens, but I can live with that.
Honestly, I mostly bought this pen because I wanted a glowing pen for October. I usually keep this one by my bed so I can see it glow, rather than in the case with the rest of the pens I intend to use for the month. Perhaps there is a deep psychological insight that can be gained from the fact that I choose to see a glowing fountain pen just before I fall asleep, but honestly glowing things are just cool and I like getting them for myself instead of just my kid. (I have some cool glowing stickers from an artist I like also near my bedside, and I’ve made two quilts that glow.)
Image Description: TWSBI Eco Fountain pen, glowing just a little in half-shaded light.
My daily journal setup is very similar to the travel stationery setup I showed in my travel bags post, so if I left it in the pen case it’d hardly ever get any light! It does mean I sometimes have to walk upstairs to get it if I decide that is the pen I need for the moment, but I can handle that in exchange for GLOW PEN.
From a functional writing perspective, there’s not much new to say about this versus my other TWSBI pens, except that I went with a medium nib this time so this could serve as a replacement for my mystery wood pen. Some kind folk made good suggestions on how I could fix the mystery wood pen when I’m ready, but I’m tired of fighting with it and decided I just wanted a pen that was easier to use. (I still intend to fix it eventually, but I’m waiting until I’m feeling more excited about the experience, so for now the pen is cleaned out and put away.)
The medium nib here is noticeably thicker than on my original pen (see image below), which is closer to the Pilot medium than the TWSBI medium. It might have been a fine nib if it had a label, but it didn’t, so I’m guessing. The bigger nib works for me: as I mentioned previously, it’s ergonomically easier for me if I write bigger and the wider nib helps encourage me to do so.
Image Description: My green glow-in-the-dark TWSBI Eco sits on a small notebook open to a page where I’ve written samples from a bunch of different pens/inks. The relevant part is that the TWSBI Eco sample at the bottom is thicker than the mystery wood pen writing at the top of the page, but you can also see samples from a couple of pilot medium nibs (both thinner than the glow pen), a pilot CM nib (similar width to the glow pen but more line variation), and the 1.1 stub nibs from my other TWSBI pens (both thicker than the glow pen).
I’m really happy with this pen: I love the glow. I can write long journal entries with it just like I do with the stub nibs without any weird hand twinges, and I don’t have to be careful with it the way I have to with my Pilot <CM> to make sure I don’t lose the ink flow. (Though the Pilot Metropolitan <CM> is getting more instinctual as I practice now that I’ve got more compatible ink in it, so the difference in writing with it may be moot eventually.) I’m glad to focus more on what I’m writing than how I’m writing it. I don’t think I prefer the medium nib over my existing 1.1 stub ones, but I like having the variety available when I go to pull a pen out, especially for doodling, so I’m glad to have this one in my collection.
The Glow Pen is a lovely replacement for my original pen and what it lacks in history and character, it makes up in being incredibly easy to use and did I mention it glows? I don’t think I can mention that enough.
Fountain pens make me think a lot about Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, the konmari “does it spark joy?” question and especially a follow-up study I read about the “pretty things are more usable” effect that I’m too lazy to find a link for right now but the gist of it was “sure, Japanese people find pretty things more usable, but surely Israeli users wouldn’t see this effect” but then the results of the study were that even their study participants found the pretty ATM interface more usable and I loved the way the researchers reported this faithfully with such gentle grumpiness about their results. Which is all to say that science says that my love of the glow probably makes this pen work better for me, and I’m happy to lean in to that effect!
I picked this pen up at the same time as my TWSBI pens (Making this pen 5 in my collection), with a similar vision in mind: trying the big stub nibs. This one sports a CM / Italic / 1.0mm stub. My first impression upon getting the pen was overwhelmingly positive: this is a solidly built pen and the Retro Pop Red colour was very much like a larger version of the red Fisher Space Pen which had been my stalwart companion through the huge amount of solo travel I did in my 20s as a graduate student.
Image Description: A pair of red pens with scissors and washi tape also in the picture. the pen on top is the Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop Red and the one below is a Fisher Space Pen. Both pens share a similar “cigar” shape and red metallic body, but the Metropolitan is wider and longer.
I was even delighted to see the bladder filing mechanism, as that matched the pen I’d used as a teenager and I didn’t even know anyone made those any more!
My first day writing with it I was just as happy as I was with the TWSBI pens. I was imagining buying a small set of different colours and having them inked up in thematic colours for each month of my journal. It was going to be elegant and perfect.
And then the next day I went to use it, the pen stopped working.
I’ll save you the journey of frustration I had and say that there were a few things in play here:
The ink I chose was not a good fit with this pen. I hadn’t realized when chose an ink sample in lower light that it was going to be so sparkly. I spent a lot of time cleaning the pen.
The reservoir was small enough that I was also running out of ink.
I couldn’t always tell which thing was going wrong.
After a month of fighting with it, I felt like I’d spent more time cleaning and refilling than actually writing with the thing. I kept “running out of ink” (or getting clogged) halfway through journal entries. The low ink/dried out feel was leaving me with a scratchy, unpleasant writing experience, and I was starting to wonder if I had a bad pen or what. So I swapped in the ink cartridge that came with it, thinking it was probably going to give me the best experience with the pen anyhow.
… and it promptly ran dry in the middle of the sentence the first time I tried to use it.
In hindsight, I probably needed to wait for the ink to saturate the nib more, or maybe I got unlucky with a bubble? I hadn’t used a cartridge in years and the instructions basically just said to give it a gentle squeeze or two, which was clearly not enough. I put the pen nib-down for a rest and left it there for a couple of days until I was done being mad at it.
And it’s been perfect ever since.
Image Description: A pair of red pens with scissors and washi tape also in the picture. the pen on top is the Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop Red and the one below is a Fisher Space Pen. Both pens share a similar “cigar” shape and red metallic body, but the Metropolitan is wider and longer. This time the pens have both been uncapped into a regular writing configuration for me, showing that the space pen with the cap “posted” on the back is of similar length to the unposted Metropolitan.
It would be funny to just end on that note, but I’ll add a bit more: I am slowly falling back in love with this pen now that it’s got appropriate ink in it. I picked up some Pilot Iroshizuku ink samples since many people recommended them as being better “behaved” so I’m hopeful that I’ll have a good experience when the cartridge runs out, and if those work out I’ll spring for bottles. I’m unlikely to buy cartridges but I’ve got a syringe so I might try cleaning and refilling this one — I think it’s holding a lot more ink than I was getting in the bladder-thing. I guess I could try using the syringe to top up the bladder so running out of ink doesn’t happen as often? I also picked up a clear converter so I can try that out and see if being able to check ink levels quickly makes my life better.
When it’s writing well and not having ink issues, the Pilot 1.0 stub is very similar to the TWSBI 1.1stub that I loved (see previous post) but being a bit thinner, it fits better in my calendar pages and results in a slightly more legible handwriting for me. I feel like it’s less smooth, but I can’t decide if that’s because I keep expecting it to run out of ink now or a real thing.
In summary: this pen and I had a really rough start, but I learned a lot about pen cleaning and ink and I think we’ll work well together now. I still kind of want to collect all the colours, but this one highlighted that I should probably try a few more nibs and that maybe the Pilot wasn’t going to be the pen of my dreams for trying all the most sparkly ink. But wow, it’s a lovely pen, and I’m glad I can finally understand why it makes so many people’s beginner fountain pen lists.
I’m starting a little mini-series about some of the “best practices” I’ve tried out in my real-life open source software development. These can be specific tools, checklists, workflows, whatever. Some of these have been great, some of them have been not so great, but I’ve learned a lot. I wanted to talk a bit about the usability and assumptions made in various tools and procedures, especially relative to the wider conversations we need to have about open source maintainer burnout, mentoring new contributors, and improving the security and quality of software.
Black’s tagline is “the uncompromising Python code formatter” and it pretty much is what it says on the tin: it can be used to automatically format Python code, and it’s reasonably opinionated about how it’s done with very few options to change. It starts with pep8 compliance (that’s the python style guide for those of you don’t need to memorize such things) and takes it further. I’m not going to talk about the design decisions they made but the black style guide is actually an interesting read if you’re into this kind of thing.
I’m probably a bit more excited about style guides than the average person because I spent several years reading and marking student code, including being a teaching assistant for a course on Perl, a language that is famously hard to read. (Though I’ve got to tell you, the first year undergraduates’ Java programs were absolutely worse to read than Perl.) And then in case mounds of beginner code wasn’t enough of a challenge, I also was involved in a fairly well-known open source project (GNU Mailman) with a decade of code to its name even when I joined so I was learning a lot about the experience of integrating code from many contributors into a single code base. Both of these are… kind of exhausting? I was young enough to not be completely set in my ways, but especially with the beginner Java code, it became really clear that debugging was harder when the formatting was adding a layer of obfuscation to the code. I’d have loved to have an autoformatter for Java because so many students could find their bugs easier once I showed them how to fix their indents or braces.
And then I spent years as an open source project maintainer rather than just a contributor, so it was my job to enforce style as part of code reviews. And… I kind of hated that part of it? It’s frustrating to have the same conversation with people over and over about style and be constantly leaving the same code review comments, and then on top of that sometimes people don’t *agree* with the style and want to argue about it, or people can’t be bothered to come back and fix it themselves so I either have to leave a potentially good bug fix on the floor or I have to fix it myself. Formatting code elegantly can be fun once in a while, but doing it over and over and over and over quickly got old for me.
So when I first heard about Black, I knew it was a thing I wanted for my projects.
Now when someone submits a thing to my code base, Black runs alongside the other tests, and they get feedback very quickly if their code doesn’t meet our coding standards. It takes hardly any time to run. Many new contributors even notice failing required test and go do some reading and fix it before I even see it, and for those that don’t fix issues before I get there I get a much easier conversation that amounts to “run black on your files and update the pull request.” I don’t have to explain what they got wrong and why it matters — they don’t even need to understand what happens when the auto-formatter runs. It just cleans things up and we move on with life.
I feel like the workflow might actually be better if when Black was run in our continuous integration system and automatically updated the submitted code, but there’s some challenges there around security and permissions that we haven’t gotten around to solving. And honestly, it’s kind of nice to have an easy low-stress “train the new contributors to use the tools we use” or “share a link to the contributors doc” opening conversation, so I haven’t been as motivated as I might be to fix things. I could probably have a bot leave those comments and maybe one of those days we’ll do that, but I’m going to have to look at the code for code review anyhow so I usually just add it in to the code review comments.
The other thing that Black itself calls out in their docs is that by conforming to a standard auto-format, we really reduce the differences between existing code and new code. It’s pretty obvious when the first attempt has a pile of random extra lines and is failing the Black check. We get a number of contributors using different integrated development environments (IDEs) that are pretty opinionated themselves, and it’s been freeing to not to deal with whitespace nonsense in pull requests or have people try to tell me on the glory if their IDE of choice when I ask them to fix it. Some python IDEs actually support Black so sometimes I can just tell them to flip a switch or whatever and then they never have to think about it again either. Win for us all!
So here’s the highlights about why I use Black:
As a contributor:
Black lets me not think about style; it’s easy to fix before I put together a pull request or patch.
It saves me from the often confusing messages you get from other style checkers.
Because I got into the habit of running it before I even run my code or tests, it serves as a quick mistake/typo checker.
Some of the style choices, like forcing trailing commas in lists, make editing existing code easier and I suspect increase code quality overall because certain types of bug are more obvious.
As a an open source maintainer:
Black lets me not think about style.
It makes basic code quality conversations easier. I used to have a *lot* of conversations about style and people get really passionate about it, but it wasted a lot of time when the end result was usually going to be “conform to our style if you want to contribute to this project”
Fixing bad style is fast, either for the contributor or for me as needed.
It makes code review easier because there aren’t obfuscating style issues.
It allows for very quick feedback for users even if all our maintainers are busy. Since I regularly work with people in other time zones, this can potentially save days of back and forth before code can be used.
It provides a gateway for users to learn about code quality tools. I work with a lot of new contributors through Google Summer of Code and Hacktoberfest, so they may have no existing framework for professional development. But also even a lot of experienced devs haven’t used tools like Black before!
It provides a starting point for mentoring users about pre-commit checks, continuous integration tests, and how to run things locally. We’ve got other starting points but Black is fast and easy and it helps reduce resistance to the harder ones.
It reduces “bike shedding” about style. Bikeshedding can be a real contributor to burnout of both maintainers and contributors, and this reduces one place where I’ve seen it occur regularly.
It decreases the cognitive overhead of reading and maintaining a full code base which includes a bunch of code from different contributors or even from the same contributor years later. If you’ve spent any time with code that’s been around for decades, you know what I’m talking about.
In short: it helps me reduce maintainer burnout for me and my co-maintainers.
So yeah, that’s Black. It improves my experience as an open source maintainer and as a mentor for new contributors. I love it, and maybe you would too? I highly recommend trying it out on your own code and new projects. (and it’s good for existing projects, even big established ones, but choosing to apply it to an existing code base gets into bikeshedding territory so proceed with caution!)
It’s only for Python, but if you have similar auto-formatters for other languages that you love, let me know! I’d love to have some to recommend to my colleagues at work who focus on other languages.
After a few months of using my mystery wood pen and the Pilot Varsity that I picked up when I bought ink for the first pen, I decided I was clearly having enough fun that I should add a few more pens to my collection.
Image Description: A pair of pens and washi tapes sitting on my bullet journal from Kela Designs which is green and features a drawing of a corgi embossed in gold. The clear pen on top is the TWSBI ECO-T and the light blue one on the bottom is the TWSBI Swipe.
So pen number 3 and 4 were a pair of TWSBI pens. I chose the ECO-T specifically because of the triangular grip since I suspected I could use some grip help. Then I saw the estimated shipping date and realized I might not get it before my next trip, so I panic-bought the Swipe from another vendor, justifying it because it has an interesting set of filling mechanisms. I probably should have gotten different nibs on them, but I was really excited about trying the 1.1mm stub nib so I got it on both. I also picked up a Pilot Metropolitan with a 1mm stub at the same time so that’s number 5. (How long before I give up on assigning them numbers?)
Back when I was a teenager with a repetitive strain injury, I’d been told that I should write bigger, try a fountain pen, and adopt a “messy” and more flowing cursive to make things easier on my hands. Yes, my “bad” handwriting was medically recommended! The 1.1 stub sounded like it could well be the perfect nib for my teenage self to force the big writing, and although that initial injury has long healed, I still rely on my hands to do my day job and my hobbies and well, everything. Spending months unable to use your hands correctly really showcases how many things you do with them. (I 100% do not recommend this experience.) I’ve been very cautious about hand over-use and very aware of how my hands feel ever since, and it’s been good for my other hobbies and work ergonomics.
The TWSBI pens and the 1.1 stub nibs turned out to be everything I hoped. It did take a bit of practice to remember to write more in a calligraphy style and watch the direction in which I dragged the pen, but I had taken calligraphy classes as a child so I actually had a lot of experience writing with a wider nib. I did have a few incidents where I forgot to let the page dry a little bit since these pens put out so much more ink than my first two pens, but thankfully there wasn’t too much smearing and spotting before I got into the right habits.
I will say that my handwriting continues to be illegible, but it’s definitely worse with the big nibs in some ways. I wrote a birthday card to my mom with the ECO-T and making it legible was harder than usual but also kind of more satisfying because it felt like calligraphy. Given my history, I’m totally fine with my handwriting being what it is so it doesn’t bother me, but it does point to me maybe choosing a different pen when I’m writing cards and letters or being very intentional about my writing.
What does matter to me is that I write a lot more with this pen. I’ve been writing journals for years and years, but switched to a bullet journal style at the start of 2023 (just a bit shy of 2 years ago) so my journal entries suddenly became more variable sized instead of “mostly fitting into a pre-printed daily/weekly journal slot” and there are more todo lists involved. At the start of 2023 I was typically writing a few sentences, but since I got the fountain pens and especially the TWSBI ECO-T, I find myself writing more. It started because I had to write a bit bigger so I had to take up more space, but since I got these pens in July I can see my entries getting longer and longer as it became easier and more fun to write with them. (And they were already longer in May-June with my first two fountain pens!) We’ll see if that keeps up over the next year, or whether it’s mostly a “new obsession” kind of thing. My interest in journalling tends to wax and wane normally so I’m not going to fret if I start writing less in future.
The filling mechanisms made less of a difference in writing, but I’m still constantly amused by watching the ink dribble over the big spring in the TWSBI Swipe as I flip it over, so it serves a purpose as a fidget. Because the ink tends to get “stuck” on the spring, I find myself tapping it every time I use the pen. So that was a surprising little bonus: I’d expected entertainment once per fill, not once per write!
Both of my orders arrived in time for the flight, and I did try bringing the TWSBI ECO-T on the plane but made a noob mistake about tightening and then forgot to put the pen upright and I wound up with a tiny leak on the way out. I was pretty annoyed with myself since I’d done a bunch of reading before the flight and thought I knew what I was doing! The leak was well contained in a plastic bag so no big deal. Unfortunately, my other mistake was that I’d grabbed a Field Notes notebook for the trip but didn’t try the pen with it, and it turns out I kind of hated them together. Some of it was that I’d gotten a bit of water in the pen when I cleaned it up after the flight, so the ink was more watery and bled through, but some of it was just that the very wide nib and the dark ink left a lot of ghosting and having gotten spoiled with the thick bamboo paper in my usual bullet journal I just felt like I’d made bad choices and wound up using gel pens and pencil on the trip after all that fuss of getting a pen in time so I would actually write on vacation. You can see the difference on my pen testing page below:
Image Description: A variety of pen names and ink names writen on a testing page of my notebook. Of particular note is the “organics studio nitrogen” sample which shows a dark blue ink with pink edges, then hte one below which says “organics studio accidentally diluted?” and shows a much lighter blue ink with less sheen. If you read them all you can get a preview of the other pens I’ll be talking about later in this series.
Oh well. I won’t blame the pen for the leaks (it was fine on the way back), but I think I’d want a smaller nib for the smaller notebook, and probably lighter ink in my travel pen so ghosting wouldn’t bug me so much. If I switch notebooks, though, I might want to consider taking the Swipe and cartridges as an option with less risk of leakage on the plane. I expect I’ll iterate over my travel setup quite a few more times before I’m through. (And as I said in a previous entry, I’m always happy to hear about other people’s travel setups if you want to share a link or a personal recommendation!)
Back home after the trip I made friends with the pen again and all was well. Some of that was helped by the Organics Studio Nitrogen ink I have in the ECO-T to this day, which I thought was going to be a boring blue when I put it in the pen because I was just grabbing samples out of a bag without looking them up. But it has this glorious pink shiny thing going on and I love it. I had a moment of panic when my sample vial ran low and I couldn’t find it in stock anywhere, but it came back in stock and I’ve now got my first full ink bottle in my collection. I think I’m going to have to clear out the drawer with my washi tape & stickers and make some space for inks!
Image Description: A much smaller notebook’s pen testing page, showing my wood pen in Diamine Marine (teal ink), the TWSBI Swipe 1.1stub in Noodler’s Southwest Sunset (orange ink), the Pilot Metropolitan 1.0 stub in Diamine Red Lustre (red ink), the TWSBI ECO-T 1.1. in Organics Studio Nitrogen (blue/pink), the Pilot Varsity (dark purple), the Pilot Kakuno in Jaques Herbin Violette Pensee (light purple), and the TWSBI Eco M in Diamine Apple Glory (green)
I feel almost like I should apologize for not having bigger writing samples to show here, but since I mostly use the pens for journaling I don’t really have anything I want to post pictures of on the internet! I’ve been rotating through lesser-used crafts as part of my fiber goals this year, and while writing wasn’t exactly on my original planned list, I declared this month “writing month” and I’ve been trying to do more unfiltered writing about my day and stuff as well as things like these blog posts. Yes, I chose writing for this month in part because it fit well with my new pen obsession. I used to write a lot as a hobby and part of the Geek Feminism blog, but I fell out of the habit for a bunch of reasons: some of it was good choices in self care, some was fear of harassment, a lot was about having a kid and not getting as much time to sit with a keyboard anymore. It’s been fun to skip the keyboard for part of this month’s goals, but it does mean a lot of writing that I don’t want to share. Maybe I should take up what other people do and copy some poems or a book as part of my pen testing to make these more interesting? Or maybe I should let it go and just focus on the written words I want to share instead of making more work for myself. Since you’re seeing this without extensive pen testing, you know what choice I made.
These two pens very quickly became my favourites, which is maybe not a surprise since their initial competition was “a wooden pen with a nib that could be better” and “a disposable fountain pen” but it was still lovely to have them work out so well. If I’m going to write a longer entry, these are the pens I grab.
Having these two pens that I like so much did raise the question of “what do I actually want my pen collection to look like?” — I could probably buy 1-2 more of these and cover my basic needs for journalling, spend money on cool inks, and be pretty satisfied in theory. But I know me, and I’m going to want to try more things to see if there’s anything I like better. I have a large collection of knitting needles of different types and shapes, and I used to sample some at the local yarn store as well for the same reason. Ergonomics can be deeply personal and I know the knitting setup that works best for endurance for me took a while to build, and I expect the same will be true about writing and fountain pens. Plus, just like knitting, I’m expecting to want different pens for a few different things: see my problems with these pens as travel companions, for example. Since there’s a variety of cheaper pens available, I expect that I’ll keep rotating through different nibs and brands for a while. And I’ll enjoy having some options for doodling even if they don’t all wind up as my regular writing pens. So this could easily have been the end of my pen journey, but I think it’s likely going to be a journey I’m on for quite a while.
One of the ideas from the “bullet journal” method that never really worked for me is the “future log” one. The idea seems solid: you need a space for writing stuff that’s coming up but maybe not in the current month or week or however you divide your journal. It’s a solid idea and it was very handy. But every time I actually looked at it, it felt… messy? hard to read? It bothered me more than I expected when stuff I jotted down wasn’t in order. I didn’t like not being able to immediately see if there was a conflict in dates I was jotting down. I made it a bit better for myself last year by reading through this future log blog post for inspiration and adding mini calendars into my journal so I could circle or highlight dates and stuff.
Image description: My 2024 “future log” with mini calendars and notes about upcoming things of interest beside it. The entry for April 2024 is shown and it lists the 12th as no school, 18-29 as Gnome MKAL14, and 26 as Romi Clue #1.
But I still didn’t love it. I knew this was something I’d be iterating on again with my next journal. And then after deciding to try one that was considerably smaller than my old 2 year monstrosity, I faced another problem: this journal was likely going to last less than a full year, and it might even last less than my kid’s academic school year. (See choosing my next bullet journal for more about why I chose that.) I was almost certainly going to need to write out a future log now and then another one in probably 6 months.
Image description: A pair of A5 journals stacked one on top of the other. The top one is green and features a gold corgi on the fabric cover, and runs 160 pages. the one underneath is blue and has only 64 pages which are also thinner than those in the big journal.Image Description: Another view of the same two journals stacked one on top of the other. In this case the photo is taken edge-on and you can see that the bottom journal is approximately 1/4 the width of the top one.
I spent a lot of time drawing dots in my current journal and measuring and trying to figure out how to fit usable calendars into the future log, and wondering if I was wasting my time if I wrote in a full academic year calendar into the small journal.
Image description: A page in my bullet journal with dots and initials for days of the week written in different sized grids.
As August rolled around, suddenly people were talking about Hobonichi and other beloved planner systems that would be coming out in the fall. Two years of bullet journal have taught me that I like having variable length entries and not having empty days glaring at me when I didn’t feel like writing. But I love the idea of pre-printed planners and I used them for many years, so even though I knew they weren’t the best fit for me right now, here I was reading about entire systems that I knew I’d never buy. I could claim it was some sort of planner research (and indeed, I do get good ideas from these articles sometimes) but mostly it felt like the stationery nerd equivalent of reading trashy celebrity magazines. I just couldn’t resist.
Eventually, I came back to the idea of the Traveler’s Notebook. As I mentioned in my post about auditioning notebooks, I love the whole vibe of their system: reusable cover, relatively cheap inserts and accessories so you could customize your experience. I tried out the passport size thinking maybe it could be a travel notebook, but it was too small and to this day I’ve only really used it for testing pens. (It’s got nice paper and it’s a good size for that, though. I may actually keep it as a pen and ink testing notebook so I’ll have a nice collection of writing samples.)
I was somewhat convinced that the regular sized Traveler’s was going to be too tall and still not wide enough, but I’d learned a lot from getting the tiny notebook. What if I got an undated calendar insert in the bigger size and tried it out? Rather than getting frustrated with the whole “future log” setup, I could just have a monthly planner that went with my bullet journal. The info would be organized the way I wanted it, and it would hopefully be small enough to tote around with my new, smaller bullet journal. And I could quit drawing dots in my notebook trying to make it work.
Lucky for me, I actually prefer my year to start in September, so the timing was good. (Look, I have three degrees and a postdoc — most of my life that’s been the “real” beginning of the year and with my kid in school now it’s when I get the biggest pile of new dates to write down too.) So I picked one up in August before the planners dropped. This might have been an attempt to head off the temptation before I went and bought something that I knew deep in my heart wasn’t going to suit me.
Image description: A Tom Bihn A5 ghost whale pouch containing a Field Notes larger black notebook, the Traveler’s notebook Monthly calendar (cream coloured), my blue/turquoise future bullet journal, a pikachu mechanical pencil and an eraser in a plastic case with a kitty face and ears.
I was delighted to find that the monthly book fits comfortably in one of my A5 Tom Bihn ghost whale pouches — the measurements made me nervous that it would feel tight around the zipper but it doesn’t seem to be a problem since nothing in there is too thick. I’ve written about how I use the ghost whale pouches for travel, and when I’m not travelling that one of the A5 pouches lives either in my knitting bag or my purse/backpack. The goal is eventually to have my bullet journal in there on the regular once I switch to the smaller one, so I threw it in so you could see the size differences in the picture.
I left it in the knitting bag for a week to see if it stuck out or got destroyed by the other things I carry. Typically I carry my knitting bag around the house with me so I can work on my knitting project or read my book no matter where I happen to sit or what activity my kid wants me to do, so it often contains large library hardcovers or other things that might squish a little monthly planner. But it survived ok in the bag with the ghost whale for protection, so on to the next phase of actually setting it up!
Image Description: A full spread of the calendar showing March 2025 with a large section marked off in washi tape for spring break (March 24-24) in Oregon.
The calendar itself is a little less wide than I’d like because the whole book is less wide than I’d like (they call it an “A5 Slim” sometimes), but it’s reasonable enough that I’m wondering if I should forgo my usual calendar spreads in the bullet journal and just use this for my daily tracking as well. I find looking at the calendar almost daily helps a lot with me keeping track of stuff so it’s not all just me being started by notifications on my phone, and maybe it would be better to be opening the whole calendar book? I’ve duplicated the calendar for September in my current bullet journal so that it matched my other months, but I’m likely going to finish my current bullet journal this month so I may go the other way and not duplicate in October and see how I like it. I can always change my mind again in November.
Image description: A detail view of part of my October 2024 calendar, showing the BSidesPDX conference marked with some black washi tape and halloween marked with a pumpkin sticker.
I’ve written out a whole academic year calendar through to June and transferred the rest of this year’s “future log” onto calendar pages. I had some fun using a dip pen and some ink samples to add some different colours once I ran out of pens that I had inked right now — I hadn’t even thought about calendar colours as a use for a dip pen but it was nice to have the option without cleaning out a pen.
Image Description: My dip pen sitting on a paper towel beside some ink samples.
As an aside: a recent email missive from the place where I bought my ink samples mentioned their church involvement and made me question whether their values align with mine. A little bit of research says they’re heavily involved with an anti-LGBTQ+ church, so I’ll probably be buying my next round of ink samples somewhere else. Thankfully I had another company I wanted to try out for samples anyhow! But I’m sad to have learned some not so fun pen world gossip as a side effect and now I have a list of brands to probably avoid unless things change.
Anyhow, back to my future-log replacement calendar:
Image Description: Yet another closeup of a calendar spread, this time done in purple ink with a few days marked with purple washi tape.
I’m glad to find that the “regular” size isn’t so tall that it can’t survive in my bag, and I’m *very* tempted to go get the leather cover and actually try using the whole system. I still kind of want the extra width of a larger A5 and maybe I could find similar notebook systems that work with that, but even though I’m no longer much of a world traveller the whole branding of the Traveler’s Notebook just appeals to me. I want to be that person sitting in foreign cafes writing journal entries and sketching, even though I’m more of a “bike to the park and knit” kind of person nowadays. But maybe I could bike to the park and write sometimes? Or take nicer sketch notes at my next conference? Now that I know that it’s not going to feel unreasonably huge, it’s probably only a matter of time before I start grabbing more stuff to match.
For this bullet journal’s lifetime, though, it’s going to be two slightly different sized A5-ish notebooks in a pouch.
I think the next step for using the calendars is going to involve stickers and more colour. I know colours and cuteness will always help me enjoy a system more, but these little boxes are so tiny that it’s going to be challenge to find some stuff small enough to fit in there. I’m glad I had small enough washi tapes already! And the tiny stickers I have from pipsticks that I use as a reward for flossing will fit on there if I decide not to use a separate tracking calendar in the bullet journal. But it’s time to go digging through the stash and maybe figuring out some targeted purchases for tiny colourful things. I did already pick up a 13-day halloween countdown from Stickii that I’m hoping will have some tiny stickers, and I may have to open it starting at the beginning of the month so I can use some spooky stickers right when October starts!
Image description: A stickii halloween countdown set in a black box made to look like a tarot deck with “The midnight tarot” written on it in shiny blue text as well as a clock, ghosts, skulls and decorations. It is sitting on a cyberpunk themed washi sheet also from stickii, and a copy of The Doodle Knit Directory by Jamie Lomax, which includes colourwork knitting motifs for a variety of seasons and themes.
I’m hopeful that I’ve found a valid solution to my “future log” problem and I’m prepared to play around with it over the course of the academic year and hopefully as I blow through a new bullet journal. I’m also kind of excited that I finally found an excuse to find some new-to-me sticker artists, since the artists I support right now tend to make bigger laptop-sized things. (Though I do have space for a few on the planner cover if I can ever decide which ones to use.) I’m feeling a lot better about this solution than I was about both my previous attempts at a future log, but I still expect to tweak things a lot before I finish this planner!
Image Description: Pilot Varsity fountain pen sitting on a pile of purple/pink/brown wool fibre for spinning.
I picked up the Pilot Varsity with a Medium nib at the same time as I got ink for my mystery wood pen, with the idea that for a few dollars I’d have a pen that would definitely work in case the wood pen was a bust. Although this is intended as a disposable pen, people online seemed to agree that it was possible to convert it to a eyedropper pen and refill it, so I that’s my plan. I’m definitely the sort of person who tinkers with things and saving a $3.50 pen from becoming landfill fodder while learning more about pen construction seemed like a nice future project.
Off the bat, it was clear that I was right to pick up the extra pen: my wood pen tended to skip a fair bit and I had questions about whether it was me or the pen. And thankfully the Varsity was right there and ready to go! It wrote super easily and smoothly and gave me a baseline for comparison. With some experimentation using both I could eventually get the wood pen to behave a bit better. But it was clear that the Varsity was easier on my hands and less hassle.
Image Description: My spinning journal with a bobbin of purple yarn singles and a Pilot Varsity fountain pen (also purple) sitting on top of it. The text is mostly boring notes about the yarn weights and how much I spun, but there is a funny note that reads “Hatch may have eaten some of the winterberry” after my dog got hold of something that might have been a stray hank of fibre.
I used the Varsity for my spinning journal during Tour de Fleece. Now, I should be clear: I’ve never been good about tracking my yarn spinning projects, and I’m not actually even sure I care about doing better except maybe remembering to put a tag on the yarns when they’re done. But I’d seen some interesting advice about spinning journals that I wanted to try, and using a fountain pen was mostly a carrot to keep me excited about the writing part. And the pen definitely helped! (I’m still iterating on how I do the spinning journal, though.)
I love the little pen, and it was noticeably smoother and less work for my hands than my previous go-to spinning journal writing implement which was a pencil. It did add at a small risk that I could wind up bleeding ink on my fibre if I dropped the pen or something. It didn’t happen, but I *did* have purple fibre and a purple pen so I wasn’t too worried. Before Tour de Fleece, I’d mostly used the Varsity in my bullet journal which has very thick 160 gsm bamboo paper, so it was interesting to see the “ghosting” on the cheaper A5 binder paper where you could see the writing on the other side.
Image Description: A pilot varsity pen sitting on top of a few daily entries in my spinning journal. The text is uninteresting project notes, but you can see some “ghosting” of writing on the other side of the page. The pen and ink are purple.
I’ve since seen this particular pen actually bleed through a little bit in some notebooks that handled my other pens ok. I wouldn’t say it’s happened enough to be a problem but this particular ink does seep in a bit more rather than floating on top of the paper. I’m not sure if that’s what people mean when they say an ink is “wet” in fountain pen reviews, and I don’t have too many inks for comparison (yet!), but that’s kind of what I imagined as a reader. It does mean I probably won’t go through with my plan of sticking this in my backpack for out-and-about use, but I’m not sad for an excuse to try some other pens to find a good one for carrying around. And please, do tell me about your favourite carry around town or travel pens! I’m figuring out my short list of what to buy and try and love personal recommendations.
I used the Varsity and my wood pen by themselves through May and June before I bought a few more pens in July. For now, this pen is living with my spinning journal but occasionally making guest star appearances in my bullet journal when I want a little bit of purple! The Varsity is a fun little pen and easy to love, and I’m looking forwards to eventually using up the ink and trying to convert it from disposable to something I can refill.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of the Flo Mask and mentioned that I wasn’t sure how well it would work for singing. Well, Wednesday Sept 11 was my first choir rehearsal for the fall season and I brought it and… it actually worked out pretty well!
Image Description: Terri, a mixed race woman, is standing near the edge of a parking lot outside. She has a Flo Mask around her neck over top of a hand knitted lace scarf, is wearing glasses, and is holding a black choir music folder.
I had brought a spare disposable mask as backup, but I wound up leaving the Flow Mask on for the whole rehearsal. The seal *did* pop once or twice so it’s absolutely not perfect, but I think that was happening with the disposable masks I was using before as well it just wasn’t quite as obvious. So it’s possibly not significantly worse from a health and safety perspective, but it was definitely more distracting. The couple of times I noticed it was while I was singing with my mouth in certain positions, so I was probably ejecting more unfiltered air than I would have liked, but only for a second or less before my jaw moved and the seal went back into place. I didn’t have to touch the mask to fix it; it went back with regular movement.
I’m not sure if it’s going to affect the way I sing overall if I have that feedback. Will I start holding my jaw differently? I think probably not, especially as I intend to practice at home without the mask, but I definitely need more than one rehearsal to figure that out.
I was using an “everyday filter” (the less strong of the two filters available for this mask). It’s generally a little bit easier to breathe in than my previous disposable 3M N95 masks, so it was not a surprise that it was also easier to sing in. Last year, the first rehearsal with the disposable mask left me feeling pretty out of breath and while I wasn’t gasping or feeling dizzy, I could barely last 4 bars of singing before I needed a breath. This year, I could manage most phrases but was still a little out of breath at the end of some — that’s actually about normal for me at the beginning of the season because I’m out of practice.
So overall, I’d say this mask isn’t perfect for singing, but it’s probably good enough! I’ll be wearing it for the next few rehearsals and I’ll see how I feel about it with some more practice, but I’m actually hopeful that I’ll be able to use it for most rehearsals this season.
(I’m also hopeful that I won’t get sick so often this season, but we’ll see how that works out in practice. Kiddo is back in school, but this year we didn’t get infected by my in-laws in August so hopefully our immune systems are all in better shape and I won’t have to worry so much about bringing public school diseases to my choir and the seniors’ homes where we sing for the holidays!)
As I mentioned in my post about my cane, I use a Synik 22 Guide’s Edition for travel because of the cane mount point. But it’s far from the only thing from Tom Bihn that I use, so here’s a ridiculously long and photo-filled exploration of what I carry in my various pouches and bags.
I’ve been a Tom Bihn devotee since I bought their Parental Unit as a diaper bag when my kid was a baby, and we loved having a sturdy bag that didn’t scream “only moms change diapers” (this was an ongoing issue in kid gear — ask my husband about the High Chair of the Patriarchy). I’ve bought a lot of gear from them over the years since and like the way many of the parts are interchangeable or work well together, so unsurprisingly they’ve become my go-to for both everyday and travel bags.
This is just a run down of my travel collection, but it’s still a lot of stuff!
Synik 22
My beloved backpack!
A collapsible hiking cane with cork handle attached to a green backpack with a strap intended for an ice axe.
Things I love about this: the cane mount point of the guide’s edition was really the big seller for me, as I described in the post about the cane. The bottom mount points get less use but are still handy for jackets. I do wish I had a quick-release for the cane: it wouldn’t be hard to make one but I haven’t gotten around to it because I got hung up on seeing if I could find matching clips and nylon webbing.
The luggage pass-through is another accessibility feature for me: being able to put this bag over a luggage handle helps me reduce the amount of extra weight I put on my injured leg, and it makes a huge difference to how I feel during and after each leg of the journey. Before I bought this bag I used to use a bungie harness thing but the pass-through is easier to do in a hurry and there’s no risk of sudden slippage. It’s been a huge upgrade for me, and I look for it every time I consider a bag now.
I also find the full clamshell-style zip incredibly useful during packing, as well as the straps inside the bag to hold things in. We often have to pull out kid entertainments in airports and those straps really help keep things organized so I can pull out just the right thing. It also makes this bag a lot more suitcase-like which I find really nice for travel. (Turns out it wasn’t particularly useful for my work commute, though, so my original Synapse is still my work laptop bag, not that it gets much use since I work from home most of the time now.)
I also appreciate the size: 22L is about the maximum I should be carrying, but it’s better if I make sure not to stuff this. I had a synapse 25 as my travel bag some years ago and it was just subtly too big for me. (Thankfully, it turned out to be a good size for a friend who needed a new bag and it’s working great for her!)
A light green suitcase (Luka mini luggage) sits next to a red backpack (Tom Bihn Synik)
Very observant people may have noticed that I also have a second red Synik non-guide’s edition which I had my kid use on the last trip, again so that his backpack would slip over luggage handles. Honestly, I probably shouldn’t have bought this bag but I didn’t know that a guide’s edition would be coming and I was very excited about the luggage pass-through. (Which, again, is a big deal for me as a cane user.) So I used this red bag for a few trips but then promptly bought the Guide’s Edition when it came out and replaced this one. But its found its niche now even if it’s no longer my primary travel backpack and instead has become my kid’s primary travel bag. When we’re not getting on a plane, it’s also good as a day trip bag and my husband will grab it when he needs a smaller backpack than his own monster travel bag.
Packing cube shoulder bag
I have used the packing cube shoulder bag since back in the days when they used to hold all my breast pump gear. We used them as smaller diaper bags when we didn’t need to carry around as much stuff, and they still get used as emergency kid entertainment packs for short trips or for leaving in the car. We have 4 of them collected over the years: grey, blue, green and yellow.
For travel purposes, I use one as my purse/knitting bag. It’s big enough to carry larger amounts of knitting as well as being a kid support unit (nosebleed cloths, snacks, toys). It’s light and flexible enough to easily get packed into my backpack as needed. We typically use them as packing cubes for amusements rather than clothes, since they’re a bit small for even my kid’s clothes at this point.
When I’m out and about at my destination I do sometimes miss having something with a bit more structure, as well as the slightly larger size of my Paradigm purse-backpack. I love the Paradigm at home because a backpack is easier with the cane, but it’s not quite big enough for the stuff I want to carry on the plane.
I do own a Side Kick that I used to use as a travel purse, but I wasn’t in love with it and the death knell rang when my kid got a tablet and it didn’t fit. I did use it for a number of trips before he turned 3. Thankfully it hasn’t been useless since then: I use it as a bag for my bullet journal and it’s great fit for that with organization for my pens and stickers and space for my fairly large A5 book. So I’m back to the packing cube shoulder bag for travel, which is more volume for less weight.
I feel like I’m still searching for the perfect bag here, but the packing cube is currently the best I have for this niche.
Ghost Whale Pouches
I use these constantly even when not traveling! The ghost whale pouches current come in 4 sizes and I think I have all of them in my travel kit, though the super mini is a little dubiously useful.
Here’s the ones I had on my last trip.
My basic first aid kit: wipes, bandaids, meds. Someone on the Tom Bihn forum recommended these locking carabiners for pick-pocketing deterrence, and I added one as baby proofing when my kid was small enough that getting into the medicine was a concern, though I rarely need to lock it now. I carry this in my purse-backpack unless I’m traveling especially light. (I wish I could claim it’s for my kid but I’m the one more likely to trip and bleed all over everything.)
Description: A small first aid kit in a Ghost Whale Pouch. There are bandages, wipes, antibiotic cream, lactaid, painkillers, allergy meds, tums and sudafed sitting beside the bag, and all of these things fit inside. There is also a tiny locking carabiner used to baby proof the bag.
Knitting notions bag: scissors, measuring tape, yarn needles, crochet hooks, stitch markers and scrap yarn. I have one of these in my purse and a nearly identical set in my knitting bag when I’m at home. If you’re not a knitter you may not realize that dental floss can be used as a knitting tool for lifelines and makes a good emergency thread cutter.
Description: A Tom Bihn ghost whale pouch being used as a knitting notions bag. Beside it are scissors, measuring tape, a small black container (for yarn needles, stitch markers and scrap yarn), a lip balm, three short crochet hooks on a keychain, a lolipop, and dental floss.
My personal travel stationary set is new this year. I talked about the ruler/stencil/bookmark and the notebook in previous posts. Previously I used to carry a tiny notebook and a space pen, but I found myself just not using that setup any more since I’ve developed a preference for bigger notebooks thanks to 2 years with an A5-sized bullet journal. I also carried a fountain pen not pictured here. I don’t know how I feel about flying with fountain pens yet, but I *do* know that I didn’t love that particular big-nibbed pen with this notebook so I’ll be switching it up for next trip if I bring a fountain pen at all.
Image Description: A pair of Tom Bihn Ghost whale pouches and their contents laid out beside or on top of them. The larger A5 size has a notebook, pikachu mechanical pencil, animal eraser in a case, Field Notes notebook and a metal ruler/stencil/bookmark from Midori. The smaller case has a couple of gel pens (also pokemon themed), a tiny set of coloured pencils, a lip balm and a lollipop.
Kid stationary set: this is used for amusing my kid when we’re stuck waiting somewhere. We play a game where one of us draws something and then the other person has to guess and draw what the first thing/creature is thinking. It gets very silly. The pen roll is also made by Tom Bihn. It’s got an interesting design where there’s a plastic piece inside to help the pens stay in; it’s actually a little overly sticky and my kid complains that they’re hard to get out, but I’d kind of rather that than having them constantly falling out in my bag. The other advantage of the roll is that it’s easy to tell if a pen is missing. This usually lives in my purse-backpack when we’re not traveling, though I do take it out for weight sometimes.
Image description: A notebook with a lenticular Google summer of Code logo thing, a set of stickers, a rainbow set of washable markers in a bright yellow pen roll and an A5-sized ghost whale pouch.
Battery case: This is just a small USB backup battery for my phone that I keep around for emergencies or for playing Pokemon Go. Having a tiny bag for this is likely overkill but I already owned the bag and it’s handy for keeping backpack lint from getting into my charge ports.
Image description: A very small purple pouch with a very small off-white USB backup battery meant for use with a cell phone.
Key Straps
The Tom Bihn “system” has little o-rings sewn into the bag. The ghost whale pouches can clip to the o rings directly, but I also use a number of key straps so you can pull things out without unlatching them. I like that they come in different colours so I can see what I’m going to fish up, which is especially nice for the keys and wallet (also from Tom Bihn) in my purse but also for the various things in my knitting bag (pictured below but not used for travel).
Image description: A pair of purple and bright orange key straps leading to mysterious items buried in the bottom of my knitting bag. There’s also a narwhal themed knitting project bag.Image Description: A blue nylon wallet clipped to a matching blue key strap. Some American money is visible in the outer pocket of the wallet.
I use my older RFID-blocking wallet when travelling to Canada and miss the clip part frequently! Maybe one day I’ll upgrade my Canadian wallet to something that I can clip a strap too but for a few trips per year it doesn’t seem worthwhile.
Some Other stuff
I bought the clear 3d organizer bag to be the liquids bag for baby shampoo, but nowadays it’s mostly used for toothbrushes and typically gets packed in the checked luggage so I don’t have to deal with security theatre in cases where our legalized bribes (I mean “trusted traveler numbers”) don’t let us avoid that part of things. Kind of overkill but it lasts better than a plastic bag. I did regret checking it when we got stranded in Chicago so maybe I’ll put it back in the carry-on eventually.
Description: A Tom Bihn rounded pouch and two pairs of sunglasses in adult and child sizes. The pouch is purple and sewn from nylon with a zipper opening and a plastic clip on one side.
The pouch pictured above was called the Q-kit (I could have sworn it was the Q-zip though) and is currently on the discontinued list. I think it predates my beloved ghost whale pouches. This is especially nice as a sunglasses case that fits both my sunglasses and my kid’s. This way when I get mine out I can offer his at the same time, which is handy.
Honestly, I didn’t like the Handy Little Thing much when I first got it because I’d envisioned using it in a way that didn’t work out. But I kept experimenting and eventually it replaced my previous charging setup for travel. It fits in the otherwise slightly awkward bottom pocket of the Synik, which is handy if I think I might want to charge on the plane/train while the suitcase is overhead, but mostly I leave it in the suitcase to reduce weight and use a backup battery for charging en route.
Overall
Yup, I’m a Tom Bihn fangirl, and I have a very expensive collection of stuff thanks to being a well-paid security professional with a love of travel gear and bags. But that slowly-grown collection of interchangeable pouches and straps has really helped me have a travel bag setup that grew and changed as my kid’s and my own needs have changed over the past many years since I bought that first diaper bag. I imagine 5 years from now I’ll look back at this and I’ll have a very different setup again, but some of these same components will be part of it.
It feels late in the pandemic to be buying a really fancy mask, but with the prospect of sitting for hours on planes while the US had increasingly significant waves of infection, I decided it was worth trying out a different style of mask to see if I liked it. And I did!
What is it?
Image description: Terri, a half-Japanese woman, is wearing a Flo mask with a cherry blossom decorative cover on it. She is also wearing sunglasses, a hat, and a Google Summer of Code t-shirt and is standing in front of some bushes.
A respirator/mask with a rigid frame and a replaceable filter. I particularly liked that it had a version intended for smaller nose bridges (common for those of us with Asian genetics), as I know fitting glasses can be a problem for me due to nose shape. I also paid extra for the “halo strap.”
I have good disposable N95 masks that I liked, but I was willing to take a chance and see if I liked something else better, especially given that I was intending to spend hours on a plane and in airports to travel so my kid could see his grandparents.
Pain points for me with my existing options:
Straps either slid down my hair or hurt my ears.
Wearing a mask for more than about an hour tended to get kind of gross
Wearing a mask during humid weather (which is most of the year where I live in the Pacific Northwest) meant it could get hard to breathe
Not the most aesthetically appealing
Took a lot of adjustment to avoid fogging up my glasses. Since I don’t need mine most of the time, I often would just take them off
How did it work out for me?
In short: great!
The “halo strap” sits on my head better and doesn’t leave any sore spots, which meant I could wear this nearly indefinitely. It does take a bit of futzing if I want my hair to sit well — I usually pull it over the bottom strap and flatten it before putting the top strap on, although since I often wear a hat (see picture above) it doesn’t matter too much to me.
The short nose bridge option did indeed work for my face! This is exciting, as I have difficulty finding glasses that fit me due to my short/asian nose bridge, so I knew it could be an issue.
The humidity in these masks condenses around the edge (instead of in the filter) and they provide a sponge to help hold it. Wiping out excess condensation with a cloth/napkin helped it from getting too gross. The filter itself never seemed to get that wet, so it was easier to breathe through even in humid conditions.
This was significantly easier to wear with glasses/sunglasses. It’s not foolproof, but typically it only took a little jiggle to fix the seal (unlike before where I’d have to adjust the nose bridge nearly every time).
It still looks kind of dorky I guess, but I like it better than many of my other options.
But most importantly: despite several trips and increasing covid numbers, I did not get covid this summer! (I did, however, get a cold thanks to being around my in-laws unmasked.)
Things that could be better
I really would have liked more colour options. I know you can just put stickers on the harder plastic shell but I haven’t done that yet and I probably would have bought extra decorated front pieces if they had them in more colours. I did get a pretty one with cherry blossoms though!
The condensation was pretty gross at times and the sponge felt inadequate, but it was so easy to deal with by wiping it out and it was so much better than my old preferred mask that it feels silly to complain about it. Still, I feel like there might be room for improvement in the design of the sponge insert.
If you don’t clean and dry the sponge and frame after use they can smell kind of bad, so definitely plan for some cleaning time after any extended use. We’re talking a swipe with a cloth or a wet wipe before putting it away which isn’t especially onerous, but it was easy to forget during travel.
I’m not sure I can sing in it without breaking the seal on my face. This may be an issue for me as I sing with a choir and wore a mask this year since even if I felt fine there was a good chance I was infected with some kindergarten disease. I’ll try it out before rehearsals start in the fall, but if it doesn’t work for that I can always use my disposable masks instead, which have a slightly larger area covering my face.
Overall
I liked this enough that we ordered some in different sizes/shapes for both my husband and kid to see if they like it as much as I do. I’m eager to see how it performs during our very wet winter, but it’s already been an improvement in the few surprise humid days we’ve had in August.
I didn’t get covid this summer while using it for travel, a short conference, and miscellaneous indoors errands. That said, the rest of my family *also* didn’t get covid and they were wearing different masks, so probably most of that was the effect of wearing a mask at all rather than this specific one.
I picked up this ruler to go with my travel notebook. I didn’t use it the way I thought I would, but it found a niche that made it fit perfectly into my travel stationery setup.
What is it?
A metal ruler that also acts as a clip bookmark and a stencil.
Image Description: A Midori Clip ruler: a copper metal ruler with stencil holes in it. The end is folded to make a clip. It is sitting on a larger black Field Notes brand notebook.
I wanted a travel ruler for drawing lines. I was mostly expecting to use it for lines in the knitting charts I was writing out and modifying during the trip. I figured I’d use it for bullet journal type stuff too, such as drawing the monthly calendar I use for tracking.
How did it work out for me?
Turns out that this actually isn’t a great ruler. The stencil meant it felt a bit flimsy on one side as you move it around on the page, and the clip is just barely enough to make a slight bump if you try to draw a line longer than 10cm. This especially was an issue for me when I drew out the calendar I use for a bunch of monthly tracking stuff.
But it is an absolutely *fantastic* bookmark for holding open the Field Notes notebook that I was using. It’s just just enough weight to hold the pages open and it worked quite well when I needed a pattern place marker for the knitting I was doing.
Image Description: My Midori Clip Ruler being used to hold open a notebook and mark a place in my pattern. The pattern is a variant on the Kelpie Etudes charts from Gannet Designs, and it has been written out in pencil. The ruler is made of copper and is holding the notebook open without much difficulty.
It turns out I didn’t need to draw as many lines as I thought I would, but I *did* need to hold the pages open while knitting my shawl for a month during and after the trip. It was also great for just marking my page so I could immediately open to the pattern page I was working on (a bit of an issue as I was working with 4 very similar charts).
It also worked ok as a stencil the few times I used it. It’s very small so it worked best with my mechanical pencil (then I coloured the results with gel pen sometimes). I could probably find ways to integrate these particular icons into my tracking, but many of them are ones I don’t use right now so it’s not super useful to me.
Things that could be better
I feel like there’s got to be a way to design this such that the clip nudges in just a milimetre or so so the full length can be used for drawing lines, but it’s clear that they intended you to use the internal slots for that so maybe that’s on me for using it outside of the design intention? If you look closely in the image below you can see the wobble at the end of the line where I hit the clip while drawing.
Image Description: Close up of the Midori Clip Ruler in use as a bookmark, showing the shape of the clip while the ruler is on the other side of the paper.
The icon choices aren’t super useful to me, so I’m probably going to keep freehanding most of my personal icons. Still, I enjoyed having some of these and maybe I’ll find uses for them now that I have them!
Overall
I was completely surprised at how much I loved this ruler/bookmark!
I nearly talked myself out of buying it before the trip since I already have a few small “gauge swatch” rulers thanks to knitting. But this was significantly better: it’s super small and slender, stays put in the notebook even if I have to stuff it in a bag in a hurry, and as a bookmark and page holder it found a real niche in my life. Despite feeling flimsy as a ruler, it felt satisfying as a bookmark and absolutely stayed put. I’d be afraid to use it in a library book lest I forget it, but it would be great in books I own. I’m debating trying some other metal bookmarks to replace the post it notes I use in pattern books while I’m working out a design.
I’m tempted to get another one with one of the other stencil options because I love it so much and wouldn’t mind having a spare for my larger journal. I just noticed the cat version has a book icon that would be perfect for my book review tracking!
I’m loosely auditioning new notebooks to replace my bullet journal. So I pulled out my fountain pens and inked up a few contenders that I hadn’t tried yet and here they are with the ones I’d already sampled:
Description: A set of 5 notebooks open to a pen testing page showing handwritten samples for 5 different pens in different coloured inks. The pens themselves are sitting on the bottom right notebook.
My current bullet journal (the one in the upper right) is a lovely book from Kela Designs. It’s going to run out of pages in a couple of months (maybe sooner if I keep messing around with drawing doggies for doggust). I really love this journal but it’s pretty thick and heavy (160 pages, 160gsm bamboo paper), and I want something thinner that I’ll carry around more and also something that’s closer to 1 year sized for me rather than the 2 years it’s taken to use this one. My desire for a smaller page count has cut me off from a bunch of the more solidly built hardcovers so I’m pretty much just looking at softcover notebooks this round.
Currently the winner is the one with the ivory coloured paper which is from Rhodia (bottom right). Paper’s a bit thicker which makes it closer to my current notebook than the others shown here. While I wonder if the ivory colour is going to go terribly with my stickers, I think I’ll like it for writing and washi tape. It’s also got a slightly rubbery cover that reminds me a lot of the Pentallic notebooks that were my daily travellers for years when I worked at UNM and could pick them up from the campus store. The appeal of this one is a much smaller page count than most A5 dot grid notebooks. It clocks in at 32 sheets / 64 pages, so it’s way thin and I’m not committing myself to 2 years of the same notebook the way I did with my current journal.
The tiny bottom one is a passport-sized one from Goulet that’s meant to fit into the Traveler’s Passport system. I *love* the idea of the system with a leather cover and ever-changing inserts, but the Traveler’s comes in two sizes and I was pretty sure they were “too big” and “too small” but my brain wouldn’t let go of the idea of trying it out. Thankfully the refill notebooks are pretty cheap so I could try it out without actually buying a cover. The paper is nice, but the size is definitely no good for my bullet journal needs. I’d been thinking about it as a travel journal option but holding it in my hands (not even writing in it!) I took a different notebook on my last trip so… it’s probably not a winner for me right now. I’ll likely toss this tiny one into my purse to see if I use it, and I might try the larger size at a future date because I really like the idea of being able to get some pre-printed calendar notebooks, but I may have to accept that while the concept is good they just don’t have quite the right dimensions for me.
Middle left is my latest travel notebook from Field Notes that beat out the passport to get taken on my last trip. It’s big enough that I could work out knitting charts in it, but I didn’t love it with fountain pens and wound up using pencil and gel pen. Since both of those are less potentially risky for travel anyhow, I’ll likely keep it as my travel companion. But it’s not making the cut for bullet journal replacement outside of that.
Upper left is from Clairefontaine. I got this one to see if I liked the paper, and I do! I also was surprised by how much I liked the wider lines for writing, as they work really well with my thicker fountain pens. I also tried sticking it in an a5 ghost whale pouch (from Tom Bihn) and carrying it around in my knitting bag and found that it was a winner for weight and size. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten kind of hooked on the dot grid thing over the past year and some of my habits and tracking rely on it, so after trying it out for a while I decided to buy the Rhodia notebook that’s likely the winner. But I really like this notebook and I’ll find another use for it!
Description: A set of 5 notebooks closed so you can see the covers. In the upper right there is a thick green A5 one from Kela Designs with a corgi on it. Lower right is a Rhodia A5 softcover in blue. Bottom middle is a smaller brown passport sized one from Goulet pens. On the lower left is a black Field Notes one, mostly A5 slzed but smaller than the other 4. On the upper left is a Clairefontaine notebook with a cyanotype illustration on it, also a5 size. There is a test tube sitting on top of it to help you see how much thinner it is than the green notebook beside it; it’s probably more than 1cm thinner.
I noticed at Powell’s that the Leuchtturm 1917 also comes in a smaller softcover with a smaller page count, so I may try that out in future. Honestly, I might have impulse bought it if they’d had it in a colour other than black. But by the time I got home and looked up what other colours were available, I convinced myself that I should start with the Rhodia that I already bought, so I’m trying to force myself to wait until I actually need a replacement (or they go on sale, I guess?).
Also, look at me with those fountain pens! I went from one pen that I found in a drawer to 5 (although one is a disposable one, and the other 3 are relatively cheap). Thankfully my current notebook has nice enough paper to accommodate me in this journey into fountain pens and pretty inks. I’m having a lot of fun!
I’ve been using a cane consistently for about a decade now and I love this particular telescoping model. It takes some weight off my injury and greatly improves my travel and conference experiences, but also having a cane that I feel is a delight to use rather than a chore has really changed the way I think and feel about my disability. I recommend this model to everyone who asks about it!
What is it?
A collapsible, telescoping cane, intended for hiking.
Caption: A collapsible hiking cane with cork handle attached to a green backpack with a strap intended for an ice axe.
What problem did I need it to solve?
I have a pinched nerve in my left hip. If I stand on a hard surface for long enough, it causes first numbness and then pain. The pain typically doesn’t start until hours after the standing, and it can take days before I go back to normal, or even months if I do something like chase my kid around the zoo without rest or stand around talking at a conference for a few days in a row.
How did it work out for me?
The cane basically does three things for me. First, it takes some pressure off my leg, greatly increasing the amount of time I can stand. Second, it serves as a reminder to me that I need to be careful, since I won’t get that feedback from my body until it’s too late. And third, it makes my “invisible” disability very visible to others. That helps a lot in places like airports where people can be impatient about how slowly I move, conferences where people are more willing to sit on the floor with me, and I’m still working on my kid remembering that I can’t chase him when I need the cane.
But those are all things *any* cane would do. What makes this one special?
It’s incredibly adjustable. Many canes use holes and locking mechanisms that allow you to adjust in fairly large increments — maybe an inch or 2cm between holes. But a 1cm difference makes a big difference to my arms, elbows and wrists. Obviously some people must get lucky and the notch is in the right place for them, and I believe the best practice involves cutting the bottom off the cane so that it’s customized for you. So it’s not an insurmountable obstacle but it’s a destructive kind of customization that requires actual tools.
When I was using a less adjustable cane, I felt often like having a mobility device was more hassle than it was worth because I was trading leg pain for back/shoulder/arm issues. But this cane allowed me to experiment and fine-tune until I found exactly what I needed, and it let me continually adapt as my needs changed rather than involving a one-off cut. This was particularly important to me when I was pregnant and my body was changing for quite some time both during and after. But some days you’re just wearing thicker-soled shoes, so it’s not like this is a pregnant-person-only kind of issue. Feeling like I could always in-the-moment make it work for me was huge: It felt like an awesome tool that I loved instead of a hassle that reminded me of my limitations.
It’s also light. Carrying any kind of extra weight can put extra pressure on my nerve, and I don’t know if you’ve ever used an el-cheapo cane from the drug store, but the ones I tried were designed to feel sturdy and solid. This may be comforting for many cane users (especially for seniors concerned about falls) but the weight was working at cross-purposes for my needs. Despite the lightness and the seemingly less-solid clips on this sporty cane model, I haven’t had it slip closed on me during and I’ve been using this particular cane for 10 years. That said, I’m not the heaviest human, so your mileage may vary if you need to put more weight on it.
As well as being light, it shrinks to be small — I have a beloved Synik Guide’s Edition from Tom Bihn that has the “ice axe” holder that fits it *perfectly* so I can strap it to my bag. (Note: The bag was only available in a limited run and I jumped on it immediately. They use to offer guide’s editions somewhat regularly but they warned us that some parts were getting hard to come by so it might be a while before they do them again.) As well as being easy to strap to a bag, this cane also fits in the seat pocket on airplanes or on my lap on a bus/car/train. These are important for me because it tends to get moved out of sight/reach in moving vehicles and it can be easy to forget it. I don’t use the cane 100% of the time so sometimes I forget that I have it with me if it’s not immediately obvious. You can see the picture of the cane strapped to the bag up above.
Beyond “not losing it” I like the ability strap to the bag when I don’t need it (e.g. I’m hiking on softer dirt trails that are unlikely to pinch my nerve) or when I need both hands free (those few minutes where we’re towing all our luggage in/out of an airport so I’ve got two rollerbags).
I also particularly like that this has a real cane head that’s been designed with comfort in mind: the cork gives a bit of impact cushioning that makes a significant difference over longer periods of time, the head is comfortable in my hand and feels more ergonomic than a stereotypical round hook or worse, a hiking pole.
Things that could be better
I use a rubber end on my cane to avoid slipping on polished floors and to reduce impacts against my hand. The cane itself has a sharp point on the end, though, intended for hiking in dirt/snow/ice. This sharp point absolutely destroys those rubber cane tips pretty quickly. My workaround is to fold up a piece of paper inside the rubber cane tip so the metal point doesn’t push directly into the rubber, and that helps a lot. Before that I used to go through multiple cane tips per year, sometimes per conference.
Also, not the cane’s fault, but I wish the American medical system was better. I had rounds of misdiagnosis, bad advice, and getting shuffled from doctor to doctor, all at great personal expense. This cane has had significantly better results than an entire care team and I’m a bit salty about the whole experience.
Overall
I love this cane so much that I bought a special “cane user” puppy sticker not just because it’s cute but also because being a cane user is part of my own identity now.
When I was first using the cane and feeling super self-conscious about looking “too young” to need it, a lot of other cane users took time to make eye contact, smile and give me “the nod” — instead of feeling uncomfortable I felt *seen* by others. If you think a cane might help you, I highly recommend just giving it a shot.
You know the genre of kids books about a child being upset about needing glasses and feeling uncool until they finally find a pair that suits them and then it’s like magic to have an accessibility aid? I hope everyone gets that kind of magic with a mobility device the way I’ve felt with this cane.
My kid is in that awkward age where he’s too big for a stroller but walking across some of the larger airports can be a lot. I’d originally wanted to get scooter luggage, but after some research I decided we’d get a lot more use out of a folding scooter that would be useful for jaunts to the park and dog walks too.
What is it?
A folding 3-wheeled scooter for kids (max weight 110 pounds). It’s even got light up wheels!
My kid’s too big for a stroller but still short enough that walking all over larger airports is a chore. He can walk for 3 hours at the zoo without problem, so I think it’s more of a mental exhaustion than a physical limitation.
I’d seen some kids with scooter luggage in Chicago on a previous trip and totally coveted it. After a bunch of research, though, it seemed like the quality of scooter luggage was mixed, and for around the same price we’d likely get a lot more long-term use out of a regular scooter. My kid was on the edge of outgrowing his toddler scooter and doesn’t yet love his bike, so this was something he wanted anyhow and would use multiple times a week and not just on trips.
How did it work out for me?
It was great!
Kiddo loved the scooter from the moment it arrived and it got a lot of use on dog walks even before our trips. Hatch was a little less excited about this as he’s afraid of people on wheels, but he’s mostly used to it now and it helped him with exposure.
I was a little worried that we’d have trouble with checking in at the airports or on the train (which has new luggage restrictions), but most gate agents didn’t even question us about it and neither did anyone on the train. Note that we were traveling first class on all flights and the train trip, so they might have been less inclined to give us trouble as a result, and there was typically ample overhead space when we boarded.
We did have to gate check it like a stroller on one of the smaller turboprop planes, and we did have to demonstrate that it folded once. No one gave us a hard time about him using it in the airport (I guess it’s just another accessibility device), we had some fun conversations with other parents, and one of the Canadian customs agents jokingly offered to set up an obstacle course so he could scoot through the line lanes since we were the only family going through at the time.
With the scooter, kiddo moves significantly faster than I do with the cane (probably close to my husband’s walking speed) so we did have to make him slow down or give him a point where he should wait for us. When there was traffic or lots of people, it could be a bit nerve-wracking and we had to get him to hop off and walk, but it was pretty good in safer streets and the emptier parts of airports.
When he got tired, he stood on the scooter and had one of us push him as if he were another piece of wheeled luggage. This worked even better than I expected and it’s pretty stable with the 3 wheels. He also just didn’t get tired as much. Scooting was more fun, I think, and took less energy for him to go at fast adult speeds.
As well as in the airports and train station, the scooter got a lot of use for jaunts to the local community swimming pool, parks, open houses, and “look at the fireflies” walks around my mom’s house. We didn’t use it in Iowa because my inlaws live in a significantly less walkable area.
Things that could be better
The method for locking/unlocking the folding is a big plastic sleeve that you pull up and down to release a clip inside. It tended to get a bit stuck and needed jiggling and two hands to operate most of the time. Not a deal breaker, but I do wish it was less finicky. We’re pretty fast at getting off the plane through experience and it felt bad to get hung up on a piece of recalcitrant plastic when you’ve got a grumpy travel kid and passengers streaming by you.
This scooter is technically a bit over our airline carry on limits in the longest dimension, but so much smaller in the other two that I don’t think anyone even noticed. If we’d been forced to put it in a luggage sizer that might have been an issue, but we flew first class so they weren’t really examining our luggage closely. We treated this as kid’s larger carry on and we only had one other small carry-on suitcase between the three of us, which may have contributed to it feeling like we weren’t carrying “too much” in the eyes of the gate staff. It would have been nice if the manufacturer had made the scooter just a little shorter, but I don’t think they designed it with carry-on in mind. (Their ad copy mentions putting it in the trunk or school locker. Plus they actually sell scooter-luggage for carry-on.)
My kid is very safety conscious but it was still nerve wracking to let him use it in Toronto street traffic or some of the busier parts of the airport so we had him hop off and walk in some places even though he really didn’t want to. This could have been more dangerous with a younger or less careful kid.
Overall
Kid loves it, I love it, and it made out travel easier!
I was surprised by how infrequently anyone challenged it. Some of that may be privilege, but it drew so little attention that privilege may not have played a big role. We did see some other kids with scooter luggage and similar so it’s obviously something airlines have seen before.
Even if it hadn’t been a travel win, it’s been a win at home in similar situations: it’s great for going to the park where kiddo might otherwise get tired on the walk home after playing, especially since he can stand on it and get a push from an adult.
