Right in under the wire, I know. Writing took a bit of a backseat for some other stuff, but I did manage to swap out most of my pens for this month. I finished filming a video for work, which required me to ink up my entire fountain pen collection. What's a disaster, am I right? My pens are all safely in the hands of our videographer, but I was allowed to keep four pens for journaling until I'm asked to swap these out too.
TWSBI Diamond 580 ALR (Broad), Sailor Studio 123
Nope, I haven't managed to empty out this pen yet. I blame the combination of a slightly drier ink and a slightly finer nib. Hey, at least it's pretty. We're almost there, though!
LAMY AL-Star (1.1 mm), J. Herbin Rouille d'Ancre
I quite like LAMY's calligraphy nibs, and the 1.1 mm nib is the sweet spot for me. Just wide enough to add some flair to my writing, but not so broad that its unwieldy. As per usual, the LAMY's triangular grip is a "meh" for me, but I grip my pen weirdly anyway, so it doesn't bother me all that much. I also learned this month that it's pronounced "all-star" and not like "A L star."
J. Herbin Rouille d'Ancre is still one of my favorite inks after all these years. As someone who has only fairly recently gotten into pink colors, I think this is a very approachable pink.
TWSBI ECO (Broad), De Atramentis Virgo
Pretty! I really liked the Jade limited edition of the TWSBI ECO, so I went ahead and added it to the collection. I'm very satisfied with how broad the nib is, because I've found that TWSBI's broad nibs tend to run finer than I would like. I had to do a little polishing, but nothing that was extremely severe.
I like to think of De Atramentis Virgo as an underappreciated ink, but then I realized that very few retailers actually carry it. I purchased this ink so very long ago at Ty Lee, a stationery store in Taiwan. Thankfully, you can still get Olive Green, which is the same color as Virgo (they're just rebottled with a different label). As a Virgo, I don't really think of Virgo-ness as green, but I won't tell De Atramentis how to represent astrological signs.
PenBBS 309 (Nemosine Broad), KWZ Cappuccino
I mentioned some problems with the piston sticking in my update to my review, and I decided to fix this by removing the piston and sealing off the knob with a bit of resin. It worked perfectly, and now I have a giant eyedropper. I use this pen for inks that I don't exactly want to put in other pens, because my collection has gotten significantly more expensive in recent years, and destroying one of them would drive me to tears.
KWZ Cappuccino has a strong vanilla scent, which is extremely weird, but you get used to it... eventually. This ink is very saturated, so I tend to dilute with some water, because otherwise you get that thin layer of undried ink on the paper. It tends to transfer to the facing page if you write on the back (kind of like carbon paper), and it will also smear if you even brush it with the most delicate of fingertip touches. No exact science here: I use a dropper to fill my PenBBS up to about yay high, and then I add water to the brim.
No comments:
Post a Comment