or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Sell Some Ink By Jessica Coles My interest in fountain pens began nearly a decade ago and it used to be under control. Especially at the beginning of my obsession, it was easy to keep my collection small since I couldn’t really afford much. But that changed…
A Little Background At every pen show I’ve worked, at least one person will ask about a particular ink color. It’s almost always sepia. They ask me to help them pick out a “good sepia”. This is inevitably a loaded question because sepia is a moving target. It’s like asking someone to recommend a good…
By Jessica Coles It’s no secret – I love finding new inks. New and exciting colors and bottles, new ink properties and behaviors to analyze and sometimes new adventures in finding, ordering and waiting for the delivery. Troublemaker Inks is a small and relatively new ink manufacturer located in the Philippines. I say relatively new…
By Jessica Coles Franklin-Christoph. New Ink. How on Earth did I miss two of my favorite things intersecting? I was only able to attend the first few hours of the Raleigh Pen Show this year, although it was long enough to see the prototype tray set out and find an amazing 45L pen in a…
Vanness Pen Shop has released their first ink product and it’s an additive for ink to help improve the drying time and flow of “dry inks”. Dry inks are the inks that may cause a pen to hard start or are overly pigmented. Some inks might have excessively long dry times, particularly on certain papers.…
By Jessica Coles In the latest newsletter from Pen Chalet, I caught a glimpse of their newest ink. However, this ink had a special twist – it is a collaboration between Pen Chalet and ColorVerse and a limited edition as well. Only 300 boxes of the ink duo will be available and only from Pen…
For the third year, Papier Plume is offering a limited edition set of inks for the Chicago Pen Show. This year’s offering is a riff on the extremely popular Lake Michigan Summer (from Chicago Pen Show 2017) called Lake Michigan Winter and a new deep brown called Bad Bad LeRoy Brown. The ink comes in…
