January Ink Palette / Spinning

[terriko]

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

Happy new year! I haven’t decided if I’m going to record my ink selections on my blog all year, since they’re already recorded in my journal itself, but I like seeing other people’s choices so here’s January’s inks!

Image Description: My January ink palette (the colours I’m using for writing in my journal this month) surrounded by the fiber and yarn from my spindle spin, which has a very similar set of colours. The fiber is a slow gradient of pink to purple to blue and back again and it’s visible in two braids, one of which is attached to a cross-arm spindle, and two “yarn turtles” (wound squarish balls of yarn made on the spindle). The ink colours are Diamine Lullaby (light pink/purple), Diamine Baltic Breeze (light blue with coppery shimmer), Diamine Nutmeg (grey with gold shimmer), Pilot Iroshizuku Yama-budo (dark fuschia), De Atrementis Cyan Blue Copper (bright blue with copper shimmer) and Diamine Cosmic Glow (medium blue with pink/fuchsia sheen).

I didn’t particularly intend for the ink and fiber to match, but I had them both sitting out on the table in my office and decided it was fun to photograph them together. The fiber colourway is listed as “omni pride” which I think is very similar to the bi pride flag. I like the richness of the colours and the gradient — I’d been planning to ply the singles together and get something with a bit of marling but I may chain ply instead because I’m so fond of the colour shifts I’m getting in the singles as they are.

Image Description: Short January book review notes written my January palette of inks with different fountain pens. I haven’t gotten around to writing out the text of these reviews yet but the important part here is to see the colours together showing the pink/purple/blue giving a slightly dreamy vibe because so many of the colours are very light. There’s also a cute “cat sleeping on a crescent moon” sticker visible at the edge of the photo where my journalling pages start.

The inks are a little less saturated and honestly the Lullaby is probably a bit too light for this pen/ink/paper combo so I may switch it out later. But I like the dreamy vibe and it goes well with my sleepy cat sticker sheet! Lullaby is weirdly fun colour to write with because of the way it dries on this paper so I’m enjoying it right now even if future me may have regrets when I try to read things.

You may notice that most of this is from the Diamine Inkvent Black box; this is because I honestly don’t own that much other ink. Most of my collection was half-empty sample vials before I bought the inkvent calendar. My goal is to use the inkvent inks heavily in 2025 and see how far I get before I decide if I’m doing another ink countdown at the end of 2025. I really enjoyed the whole process of swatching and using new inks every day for most of December, but I am very concerned that if I do this every year I’ll be over-run with more ink than I can use. So step 1 is using at least a few inkvent inks every month and we’ll see how it goes!