In Link Love

Link Love: Late Night Last Call Link Love

Author AnaPosted on 1 Comment
Link Love: Late Night Last Call Link Love

I started this blog post this morning and thought, foolishly, that I would have time in the middle of the day to finish. HAHAHAHA! So, in the spirit of  my guilty pleasure drunk snack, this is the Late Night Last Call (Jalepeno Popper) Edition of Link Love. So, grab your favorite bag of snacks and enjoy the Year-End Wrap Ups and some potentially hot button posts.

Hope you have a grand (and safe) New Year’s Eve. See you on the flipside!

Year End Wrap-Ups:

Pens:

Ink:

Pencils:

Notebooks & Paper:

Art & Creativity:

Other Interesting Things:

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In Desk Set

Calendar Review: Himekuri Sticky Note Calendar 2022

Author Laura CameronPosted on 1 Comment

As I’ve posted before, I’m pretty specific in my calendar/planner needs. I’ll do a more in detail post next week about what I’ve decided to use for 2022 (I can’t believe we’re there!), but first I wanted to share with you a fun little calendar I got from Jetpens.

The Himekuri Sticky Note Calendars ($32.00) are made up of seven little stacks of what look like post-it notes. They are mounted on a sturdy cardstock back that actually folds nicely into a stand so that the calendar can occupy a place on your desk.  The calendars come in a variety of themes: cats, stationery, sweets, zoo and a few others. I purchased Memory which has a variety of gorgeous photos.

The calendar also comes with a memory booklet, where you can store your daily sticky images after you’ve removed them from the calendar. All the text is in Japanese, and I assume it provides more context to the photos, or bits of wisdom, quotes etc. There is a little room in the margins, so I might use mine to record my own thoughts of the week in short form.

Overall, I was really charmed by this little calendar. I’ve added mine to the bulletin board right above my monitor so I can see the week at a glance and enjoy the beautiful photos each week.

DISCLAIMER: I purchased the items for this review with my own money and all opinions are my own. Please see the About page for more details.

In feature

My Favorite Home Office Items for 2021

Author AnaPosted on 6 Comments

When reflecting back on 2021, a year many of us spent working from home, I thought it might be nice to reflect on the things that worked — and the things that didn’t. While this post is not pen and ink related, I suspect a lot of folks can relate to the need to upgrade their home office — whether you were working from home or just spending a great deal more time at home.

Stuff that worked:

Standing Desk from Ikea

I didn’t think I needed an electric powered standing desk but I love it! Yes, Ikea has hand-crank models but do yourself a favor, if you’re considering a standing desk, spend the extra money for an electric powered model. First thing in the morning or late at night, cranking frantically to adjust your desk is not something you want to be doing.

Apple Music and AirPods Pro

After half-heartedly futzing around with Spotify for several years, I bit the bullet and switched to Apple Music. I am an Apple user through-and-through. While Apple Music isn’t perfect, I find it easier to make playlists, add new music  and even find new music. I don’t know why Apple Music is easier for me to use, it just is. I also OD-ed on podcasts using Overcast and a lot of videos on YouTube.

Rediscovering my Filofax

Thanks to some serious housekeeping and mutual enthusiasm over the Filofax from my pal Julia, I rediscovered my old Filofax and have been using it for notes and planning. Like many, my planning needs changed over the past two years. I have gone from working for the same company to freelancing to a new job all in the past two years, all while social distancing and often working from home. My planning needs have changed dramatically, as I’m sure its been for many other people. Switching to a system that allows me to quickly and easily add or remove pages and sections has made it a great new-old option for me.

Office Chair

I tried an assortment of different chairs over the past 18 months since the start of the pandemic and I had yet to find a good one. Like so many people, I grabbed whatever I could find at Ikea initially. As you’d expect, “any old chair” didn’t really work well. I tried a couple random purchases from Amazon and a kitchen chair without much better luck. But lo and behold, as I was planning this post, my DH rolled a secondhand Herman Miller Aeron chair into the office as my Christmas present. He was a little unsure if it would be a good gift but I love it! My chair is the small size, which, to some, will look a chair for a doll but when you’re only 5’4″ on a good day, most chairs are just too big. o, I’ve got my Goldilocks chair… finally.

Stuff that didn’t work:

I tried upgrading my lighting set-up for the blog with some of the more streamlined flat panel LED lights. Worst decision of my blogging career. I am sure that someone else could make them work but I tried recalibrating my set-up repeatedly and still had to retouch my photos to try to get more accurate color to no avail. One morning, practically in tears of frustration, I took the new slimline LED panels and buried them in the basement and reinstalled my giant fluorescent tube-powered soft box lights. While i was disappointed that I couldn’t get the LED panels to work to my satisfaction, reinstalling the old soft boxes was such a relief it was hard to stay too upset at the wasted expenditure.

Did your office set-up change over the last year or so? What has worked for you and what are you still fine-tuning?

In Ink Review

12 Days of Inkmas: Day 12 Birmingham Blizzard Twinkle

Author AnaPosted on 1 Comment
12 Days of Inkmas: Day 12 Birmingham Blizzard Twinkle

I absolutely love that Birmingham Pen Company took their ink making process in house. Over the past year, they have been fine tuning and streamlining their  process and getting a crash course in the fine art and chemistry of ink making. Of their several different formulas, their Twinkle inks seem most appropriate for the holiday season — like icicles, holiday lights and sparkly decorations.

Blizzard Twinkle is an icy, turquoise blue with silver shimmer. It looks cold and icy in the bottle — like the color of those icy pops in the plastic tubes we used to get at the 7-11 when we were kids.

The color does remind me of twilight skies and snowy nights.

On Col-o-dex cards, with a dip nib, the shimmer is very vivid.

Birmingham Pen Co Blizzard Twinkle on 68gsm Tomoe River

The big bonus with Blizzard Twinkle is that it is a trifecta ink: shimmer, shading AND sheening! Depending on how much the ink is shaken or settled in your pen, how much pressure you apply, if you are dipping with a flex nib, etc — all three effects will be revealed. The color will shade from a deep teal to turquoise. Sheen will appear along the edges of letterforms or where ink pools to a red-almost-purple. The silver shimmer can be visible with wider nibs and dip pens. The more ink on the page, the more shimmer will be visible. More is more!

Birmingham Pen Co Blizzard Twinkle on Rhodia
Birmingham Pen Co Blizzard Twinkle on Rhodia, close-up
Birmingham Pen Co Blizzard Twinkle on Rhodia, close-up

When comparing Blizzard Twinkle to other shimmery blue inks, I pulled a small selection of turquoise-to-teal inks. Some have gold shimmer and some have silver shimmer. I am sure there are more options but these were the ones I could find (Where are all my swatches!?!?).

Pen BBS No. 338 Guardians of Good Fortune and Blizzard Twinkle are similar in color but No. 338 uses gold shimmer instead of silver. Robert Oster Morning Shine is more greenish but does have silver sheen.

I was able to find a few more shimmery blue inks in my Col-o-ring cards. Diamine Jack Frost certainly has more visible sheen but its an entirely different shade of blue. The other shimmery blues I found from  Diamine were also distinctly different hues. So, at the moment, I feel like Blizzard Twinkle is filling a nice gap in the ink color/shimmer rainbow.

Hope you have a shimmery holiday!

Tools:

In Ink Review

12 Days of Inkmas: Day 11 Pen BBS No. 401 Afternoon Ink

Author AnaPosted on Leave a comment
12 Days of Inkmas: Day 11 Pen BBS No. 401 Afternoon Ink

For today’s Inkmas, I finally get to recommend an ink that is still available: (I lied. It’s out of stock. I am THE WORST!) Pen BBS No. 401 Afternoon Ink ($8 for a 15ml bottle). This color was part of a series of daylight and nighttime colors that included the Pen BBS 398 Morning Ink featured earlier in Inkmas.

Afternoon Ink represents afternoon skies as I’ve only ever seen in very hazy places like China. Due to smog and pollution, this is what the sky often looked like when I was in China. Descriptions of smoggy skies aside, Afternoon Ink is one of the most unusual ink colors in my collection.

Writing sample on Rhodia. Ignore the washi tape, we had a little ink accident.

Afternoon Ink is a warm, reddish brown ink but very light. It shades beautifully. Because it is so light, I recommend using it with a wider nib or it could be too light to read.

Today it’s really easy to see that Rhodia paper looks warmer (almost pink) under my lights and the Tomoe River paper looks cooler (more green) — the Tomoe River is more of an off-white and that is a hard color to photograph accurately and get to display correctly on all monitors.

Writing sample on Elia Notebook with 68gsm Tomoe River paper. Ignore the washi tape, we had a little ink accident.

The ink color does darken a bit as it dries which makes it appear deeper than when I was writing with it.

When comparing Afternoon Ink with other inks, I noticed someone in the comments on the Vanness Pen Shop site suggest a similarity between Afternoon Ink and Montblanc Swan Illusion.

I think Swan Illusion is much darker but is also an unusual color. Ferris Wheel Press Cream of Earl is too light (honestly, its too light to be usable) but was the closest I could find in terms of hue and lightness in my collection. Colorverse Jupiter Fly By from the Voyager I limited edition set was the only other ink in a similar range. Many inks were much darker, redder or yellower.

So, yes, Pen BBS No. 401 Afternoon Ink is a unique color worth seeking out if you like these sorts of not-quite one color or another sorts of inks. Pen BBS inks are priced right and behave well so it’s certainly a better option to try to track down a bottle of No. 401 Afternoon Ink then to try to get a bottle of Swan Illusion or the Color Voyager I set.

Tools:

In Link Love

Link Love: Looking Forward, Looking Back

Author AnaPosted on 5 Comments
Link Love: Looking Forward, Looking Back

The end of the calendar year always provides a mix of posts looking back over the year and looking forward to the new year. I can’t help but filter 2021 through the lens of the pandemic. The news of the Omicron variant has only exacerbated the likelihood that 2022 will be our third year in a pandemic. While I love pens, ink and stationery, I am curious how another year of the pandemic will affect supply chain problems, inflation and other unforeseen forces that might impact our hobby — and the world at large.

I will try to be positive about 2022 and hope that it brings about a clear end to this life-altering pandemic.

Pens:

Ink:

Pencils:

Notebooks & Paper:

Art & Creativity:

Other Interesting Things:

We need each other. Please support our sponsors and affiliates, or join our Patreon. Without you, we could not continue to do what we do. Thank you!