The ink color is Diamine Steel Blue; the pen is a Pilot Metropolitan.
My elementary school encouraged and required all of us Kindergartners to keep a journal. We needed to practice writing, and having a black and white, speckled-cover composition notebook of our own was DELIGHTFUL. I filled mine with colorful-but-poorly-formed words! I wrote and illustrated stories about red-haired girls having adventures! IT WAS GREAT!
And, the habit stuck with me. By the time I was finishing college on weekends while working full time at a law firm (note: do not do this, it is exhausting), and the college offered a few units each semester for maintaining a journal, I jumped at the chance… and then startled my college advisor by filling it in the very first semester, and starting another…
I still write by hand, especially for letters to pen pals and journals. My hands get sore easily, so I can’t write with dry ball point pens for long: they involve too much pressing. It turns out that very wet gel pens are better (HELLO, Uni-ball SIGNO!), but I fly through them, and feel terrible throwing out handfuls of disposable pens each month. Refillable gel pens come and go, and are very portable, but still involve tossing significantly smaller bits of plastic and metal out almost daily. The lowest waste and lightest-ergonomic-touch pens I can use are fountain pens with “converters” that can be filled with ink directly from a bottle.
It turns out I LOVE writing with fountain pens.
I have friends who collect these, but when they spoke of it, I didn’t really grasp the point: they showed me the pens themselves, not what they were capable of, how they performed as pens. Also, they didn’t mention to me, an overzealous color fan, how many ink colors are available.
Now I know. Oh, do I ever know.
I’ve been reluctant to show off either my ink or pen collections, even though both are very modest. Despite their modesty, writing with these tools brings me disproportionately large joy. My reluctance comes from the popular ways of writing about products by presenting oneself as a semi-professional expert reviewer, who talks up the qualities of the product yet never really MAKES anything with them.
There are countless video tutorials on how to SWATCH EVERYTHING – how to provide samples of a display quality that would please a salesperson. But… why?
While this swatching approach may help me better document my watercolor paint tube collection and so prevent me from buying the same shades of celadon green accidentally, it’s awkward as one’s only shared output. (Also: one can never have too many shades of celadon.) I don’t really trust someone who has only swatched a paint to tell me whether or not it belongs in their paintbox for their actual painting practice (if they have one)… I have some credible enthusiast reviewer sources of fountain pen ink who have recommended against using inks they received for free AND who freely remark on beautiful inks that aren’t LEGIBLE for actual writing, and that is feedback I can use. But there is a lot of reviewing-popular-products-for-clicks content, and I don’t want to participate in that.
So, how will I be different? I’m going to show what I wrote with the pen and the ink for my own enjoyment. Maybe you’ll like it. Maybe you won’t. Perhaps styling of these images by coordinating pens, inks, and backdrops will prevent me from staring deeply into my favorite pen shop’s Instagram feed and purchasing pens I don’t need. I expect it to make my blog more visibly interesting.
Either way, now is a GREAT time to create these posts. Everyone in my mother’s family has terrible arthritis: my ability to write legibly with fancy pens won’t always be available! I’ll seize the (quiet, quaint, pen-geeky) moment.