The Well-Appointed Desk

NaKniSweMo

Laura CameronNovember 2, 2021November 1, 202110 Comments

Last week on the Pen Addict podcast, Brad talked at length about NaNoWriMo. If you aren’t familiar with that term it stands for National Novel Writing Month. Each November, many many intrepid writers gather together to write a novel (or 50,000 words) between November 1 and November 30. The organization that supports it (which is now a 501c3) provides structure, milestones, encouragement and a network to support burgeoning writers participate. While many participants work digitally (composing on a computer), Brad talked about how he wanted to use NaNoWriMo to spend more time with his favorite tools: pen, ink and paper.

Every year since 2010, Ana and I have been participating in a lesser known, but similarly themed November event called NaKniSweMo. This stands for National Knit a Sweater Month and, like its inspiration, encourages crafters (knit and crochet are welcome) to create a garment between November 1 and 30th that contains at least 50,000 stitches. Ana and I use all of our analog tools to participate: needles and yarn to knit with, notebooks and pens (or spreadsheets if you prefer digital) to track our progress of stitches knit. Each year we plan for the process, scouring patterns, jotting down ideas or sketches, and getting ready for the event. And then we knit.

This year, I’m going to be knitting a cropped pullover sweater, Nydia by Vanessa Smith (pattern available on Ravelry). My yarn is Delightful DK from Apothefaery Fibers in the At the Hearth colorway, a gorgeous pumpkin orange I think is perfect for the fall. I’ve already done my homework (testing out the stitches to be sure it will create fabric of the right feel and proportions), and I’ve set up a notebook to track my progress.

In case you’re interested in seeing what we’ve done in the past, I’ve included a few of Ana’s and my past projects for NaKniSweMo.

Do you participate in a November project? (or any other month?) We’d love to hear about it and see your progress!

In Pen Review

Brush Pen Review: Kuretake Zig Fudebiyori Metallic

AnaNovember 1, 2021October 31, 2021Leave a comment

Review by Tina Koyama

It’s planner prep season, and it’s also time to start thinking about (say it ain’t so!) the holidays. I took care of both with one set of brush pens: the Kuretake Zig Fudebiyori Metallic set of 8 colors (8/$17 or $2.50 each).

Although I have a gazillion brush pens and use them frequently, most are black, and I’ve somehow managed to resist color. In the daily scribble journal I’ve been keeping, however (more about that coming soon), color is essential. Since I already know and love the basic black Fudebiyori, these were an easy choice. (If you need more than metallic colors, Fudebiyori brush pens come in 48!)

First I tested them in a Leuchtturm 1917 A5 notebook, which is what I’ll be using for next year’s daily journal. Only silver shows a significant metallic sheen, but it may be because the pigment-based, acid-free ink contains no stinky, toxic xylene or other solvents. I have several metallic pens containing solvent-based inks, and while they are shinier, I’m fine with the tradeoff in using safe, non-smelly markers. I’m showing both a photo, which shows the metallic effect better, and a scanned image, which captures the colors more accurately.

The bold inks ghost on the back of the page, but no bleeding is apparent.

Next I tested them in my red and black Shizen journals, where these metallic brush pens pop and shine. Red even shows up on red paper, and black shows on black! That’s when I saw potential for holiday cards and other festive uses.

Of course, I also love making winter nocturne scenes on the black pages of my Stillman & Birn Nova Trio sketchbook, so I couldn’t resist a pre-dawn sketch of the front porch and car across the street (I used silver and black brush pens).

These will do nicely for festive writing, daily journal scribbling and even sketching!

DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by JetPens for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.

Tina Koyama is an urban sketcher in Seattle. Her blog is Fueled by Clouds & Coffee, and you can follow her on Instagram as Miatagrrl.

In Ink Review, photo

Yarn & Ink: Halloween Frankensocks

Laura CameronOctober 29, 20213 Comments

In September a lovely friend sent me a belated birthday present, a Frankensocks kit from Knitterly Things.

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A post shared by Laura Cameron (@fluffykira)

Knitterly Things is known for dying self-striping sock yarn. That is, she dyes the yarn such that when you knit it up you get delightful stripes in your socks without having to change yarns and having all the extra ends. This kit was bits and bobs of leftovers of her colorways so that you could create spooky mismatched socks (a la Frankenstein).

I’ve been squeezing these socks in between work projects for a few weeks now and I think I’m going to finish in time to wear these beauties on Halloween, but I thought they’d make for an EPIC yarn and ink post.

Without further ado, a few of the hues I see:

In Ink Review

Ink Review: IWI Colors of Nature Part 3

Jessica ColesOctober 28, 2021November 12, 2021Leave a comment

The most recent ink line in my collection is the IWI Colors of Nature line. The line includes 24 colors so I will be presenting the collection in parts – today I’ll be covering the third set of 8 out of 24. I purchased my samples of IWI Colors of Nature inks at Vanness: each ink is $12 for a 30mL bottle or $2.60 for a 4mL sample. If you missed part 1 or part 2 of this series, make sure to read those as well.

I’ve divided up the Colors of Nature inks into various themes. Today’s inks are all in the Temperature and Condensation group. I’ve started with Slight Heat. I’m not certain of the order of these inks so I’ve ordered them with how they would be seen in Colorado. Slight Heat is similar to ColorVerse Supernova.

Great Heat is next which is nearly identical to KWZ Chicago Blue.

Limit of Heat is a great rust orange close to Diamine Ancient Copper. However, IWI Limit of Heat feathers quite a bit.

Slight Cold is my favorite of the Temperature and Condensation group (purple is best!). It shades dramatically in the swatch and slightly less dramatically in writing.

Frost’s Descent shows a decent amount of sheen and looks like a darker version of Robert Oster Fire & Ice. Surprisingly, I didn’t see feathering in this sample at all.

IWI Slight Snow is a dusty rose and was hard to match from my current swatch cards. This was the worst in the feathering category in the Temperature and Condensation group. I was disappointed since this is an amazing color!

Great Cold is slightly darker than Monteverde Rose Noir, but again, feathering.

The final ink today is Great Cold ink – strangely this is nearly the same color as Great Heat. It has a bit more blue in the mix and is almost a match for Kobe #50.

I love seeing the differences in these inks on Tomoe River paper (top) and Cosmo Air Light paper (bottom). CAL shows the blues in Slight Cold but almost blocks out the pink. CAL also has a more defined boundary to the ink edges rather than the granulated texture on Tomoe River paper.

Again, on Tomoe River paper (left) and Cosmo Air Light paper, the ink shows different properties. Slight Snow shows as bluer on CAL paper.

The differences in color don’t show as dramatically with Great Cold and Great Snow (CAL paper on the left and Tomoe River paper on the right), but the texture difference is easy to see here.

I inked three pens that each had the same nib to test the feathering issues with a more even ink flow and with a rounded point nib. Cosmo Air Light paper is on the top here with Tomoe River paper on the bottom. I did not see a single issue with feathering this time. The “l” in Slight Snow isn’t showing feathering, just a bit more ink.

However, when I wrote on Col-o-ring paper with the same three pens, the feathering showed up again in Slight Snow with a touch of feathering in Slight Heat as well.

Finally, here’s a photo of the eight inks reviewed today:

If I look at the entire 24 inks of IWI Colors of Nature only for the colors, I adore this lineup. The colors are not standard, the line has a wide range of colors, and several are colors I do not already have in my collection. But I can’t ignore the feathering issues with these inks. I don’t know if this is something IWI can change in the future but until that time, I can’t recommend more than a few of these inks for everyday use. I will check back periodically to see if the line has been updated – if the feathering is fixed, these inks will be a huge hit!

DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were purchased by me and I was not compensated to write this review. Please see the About page for more details.

In Link Love

Link Love: Magic Brushes

AnaOctober 27, 2021October 27, 20212 Comments

Austin Kleon loves his Pentel Pocket Brush Pen… so much so, he made a video.

Sometimes, the tools we use unlock the magic within us. It could be the kind of strokes they put on the paper, or sometimes its the color of the the ink or how it feels in our hand but this is the magic we are often looking for when we venture out into the world (real world or virtual world) looking for a new tools or new notebook. We are trying to find or recapture the magic we had or we’ve seen other have. We know that it is often just the process of doing the thing that will get us back into that zen state but sometimes, just getting us to sit back down with our notebook or pad, we need to bribe our inner child with a new pen or notebook.

My inner child likes to have several pens so she can be enticed with switching colors at a whim — particularly if titles or page headers can be written with a larger brush pen (like Austin uses). The new washi strips are definitely helping to keep my child brain engaged too.

How do you soothe your inner child when he or she doesn’t want to settle down to work? Do you set a timer? Do you promise a snack or a treat to yourself for working? Do you woo your inner child with a shiny new pen or notebook?

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In Ink Review

Fountain Pen Ink Review: A collection of yellows.

Laura CameronOctober 26, 2021October 26, 20213 Comments

For the past few years, I have taken to collecting inks in the Pantone Color of the Year. This year there were two colors, Ultimate Grey and Illuminating, a bright yellow. A few years ago I spent my Inktober focusing on 31 shades of grey, so I knew if I was going to do anything this year it would need to be in yellow. As there are only a scant two months left in the year, and yellow is the ink I have the least of in my collection, I went ahead and ordered a bunch of yellow samples to try!

My selections include:

Papier Plume Yellow (30 mL, $8.00)
Rohrer and Klingner Helianthus Sunflower (50 mL, $11.95)
Vinta Sunrise Hanan (30 mL, $12.00)
Robert Oster Aussie Gold (50 mL, $17.00)

Papier Plume Yellow is probably the closest to Illuminating, a bright sunny yellow that is the very color I think of when I think of yellow. While the ink is beautiful and can shade nicely, my biggest complaint about it is that I don’t think it’s terribly legible. While I couldn’t do without this sunny yellow in a rainbow, I just don’t know how practical is it for fountain pen usage.

Rohrer and Klingner Helianthus Sunflower is a gorgeous yellow-orange that reminds me of fields of sunflowers or egg yolks. It is beautifully legible though there’s not a ton of shading in it. I also don’t know if it quite hits the yellow spot for me – it’s just a little on the orange side. I tend to think of this color as more of a goldenrod?

Vinta Sunrise Hanan is a yellow that leans a bit gold. There is more shading in this one, but it takes a bit of a step back on the legibility scale, particularly with my glass nib. I just love the way it shades on the Col-o-ring card though!

And finally Robert Oster Aussie Gold is a deep golden yellow, the color of summer wheat fields. This one has some glorious shading as most of the Robert Oster inks doo, and is quite legible in writing.

As you can see from my Col-o-ring Oversize, I don’t have too many yellows in the ink stash – Robert Oster Honey Bee and Franklin Christoph Honey Comb cover the gold spectrum, and Colorverse Gluon and Platinum Citrus Black cover the yellow-green/olive end of the spectrum.

In almost any other color of ink I enjoy having a large variety of hues to choose from, but I guess the lighter nature of yellows just keeps me from buying too many.

Paper: Baron Fig Mastermind Desk Pad ($16)
Pen: Delike Glass Signature Pen ($37.80)
Swatches: Col-o-Ring Ink Testing Book ($10) and Col-o-Dex Rotary Cards ($15), Col-o-Ring Oversize ($15)

DISCLAIMER: Some of the items included in this review were provided to us free of charge for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.

In Paper Review

Notebook Review: Good Inkpressions A5 (Splendorgel Paper)

AnaOctober 25, 2021October 25, 20211 Comment

Good Inkpressions is a notebook company in Spain that is focusing on a wide array of fountain pen friendly notebooks that features well-known papers like Tomoe River and Clairefontaine but also a “new to me” paper called Splendorgel.

I was excited to see that Good Inkpressions was stocking Tomoe River and Clairefontaine but I was curious to see what Splendorgel paper was so I ordered an A5 blank notebook ($16.24 USD). There are multiple cover colors available as well as an assortment of ruling options. Each book includes 120 pages and the editions with rulings are printed with soy based inks.

The covers are blind debossed using a Vandercook letterpress which is subtle and pleasantly minimal.

Good Inkpressions Splendorgel A5 — ARGH!!!! CAT HAIR in the photo!!

The double-fold cardstock cover opens flat and the heavy duty staple binding is visible along the spine. All four corners of the notebook are rounded which is unusual but with the lighter weight soft paper covers rounding the corners eliminates the likelihood of corner dings.

Once opened, the pages lay flat with little effort.

The Splendorgel paper stock is listed as 85gsm on the website and is a soft white. Above, are samples of the Good Inkpressions Splendorgel paper on the far right and then regular Leuchtturm 1917 paper next to it which is the closest in color. Next is Profolio Oasis which is more cream/ivory colored and the Good Inkpression 68gsm Tomoe River (the lighter White) and finally on the far left, bright white Col-o-ring paper for comparison.

The Good Inkpressions Splendorgel is not so yellowy to affect ink colors unless its a very light shading ink. It’s “easy on the eyes” soft white.

I decided to cut to the chase in testing the paper and pulled out a Pilot Parallel pen to lay down a massive amount of ink and see if there was any bleeding or feathering issues. Nope. The Pilot Parallel ink was Diamine A Leap of Faith (link to Mountain of Ink’s review of the ink). There was not a ton of sheening evidence but I really don’t use a ton of sheening inks so its not a make-or-break for me. Less sheening also means shorter dry time.

The view of the reverse of stock shows a little bit of show through but no bleeding.

Once assured this paper was fountain pen friendly, I tested an array of other writing tools and was successful with all of them.

The only evidence of any bleed through was the rollerball pen and there was just minor bleed through. Again, the darker or heavier inks had a little show through but not so much as to limit the use of both sides of the paper.

Since I didn’t purchase any with ruling I am not sure how dark the printing is on the pages but looking at the samples on the site for the planner inserts, it looks like a middle grey is used.

In the time since I initially placed my order with Good Inkpressions, they have added a lot of new products including planners and inserts for a variety of different tastes. They offer Filofax inserts as well as Traveler-sized notebooks in all the varieties of papers they stock with an array of ruling as well. These are options that I’ve not seen offered by any other notebook company thus far.

The prices for the notebooks are quite reasonable, the quality of the notebooks is very good and I received my order within a couple weeks which is not bad for international orders. If you are looking for a new FP-friendly paper or a maker who offers familiar papers in formats not often available, then Good Inkpressions is worth a try.

DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were purchased by me and I was not compensated to write this review. Please see the About page for more details.

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