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.
As expected, I finished my bullet journal, just barely managing to fit an entry for Sept 30th, 2024 on the last page. It was started on January 1, 2023, so it lasted just under 2 years. The corgi design is from Kela Designs, and I bought it for myself on the condition that I actually *use* it and not have it wind up in the unused notebook stash.
Image Description: A pair of A5 journals and a clear writing board. On top is my new journal, a Rhodia softcover, and underneath is my hardcover corgi journal from Kela Designs. Both are sitting on a quilt a friend made for my wedding.
I’d never actually done a bullet journal when I started this, though I’d written short journal entries on and off since I was a kid. I hadn’t really made much effort in tracking stuff but it seems like such a part of bullet journal culture that I figured I’d try it out, and some of it worked for me and other parts didn’t. It was great treating each month as a new event where I could set up different pages and iterate rather than sticking with a layout preset for the whole year. Those big blank pages also gave me more space for doodling, stickers, washi tape and eventually fountain pens.
Image Description: A doodle of a husky dog with hearts, drawn in fountain pen with some pencil for colour. It is surrounded by some red text from a journal entry.
Mostly my journal is for me and me alone, but in celebration of this one getting filled up I thought I’d share some doggust doodles and other marginalia as a bit of a send off. Most of these were drawn from random cute dog pictures I found via image searches.
Image Description: Doggust drawings from 2023. Doggust is a “draw a dog every day in August” art prompt series. Here I’ve pasted in a dog drawn on a scratch-off note card, and a painting of rainbow spotted dalmations.
Image Description: A doodle page in my bullet journal with fountain pen drawings. It features a corgi, miscellaneous house items, leaves, stars and abstract shapes, a copying of an alphabet/number font, and another small dog.
Image Description: A small cartoon potted plant with a happy face on the pot. It is drawn in green and purple fountain pen, and is surrounded by other text in my bullet journal.
And a bonus: my kid’s first fountain pen drawing! He wanted to try my new glow in the dark pen, although alas I don’t have glow in the dark ink.
Image Description: A small smiling sun drawn in green fountain pen by my then 6 year old kid. His first time using a fountain pen! If you look closely you can see where he made a dent in the paper instead of a line near the top of the sun.
While half of the “bullet journal method” wasn’t for me, I’ve found that I do love the dot grid format, and I’ve got a new journal set up to go for October now! My post about auditioning new bullet journals can tell you about how I chose my new notebook, and I also talked about the calendar part of my bullet journal journey in I hate the “future log” of my bullet journal. So this time I’ve got a smaller calendar and a listing of my fountain pens/inks for October!
Image Description: A beginning of the month page in my new journal, featuring halloween themed stickers, a small calendar, and a list of pens and inks. There’s a green TWSBI Eco fountain pen with a glow in the dark green cap propped against the next cream coloured bullet journal page.
I’m excited about my new setup and thankful for my first journal for the past two years together!
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.
I picked this pen up at the same time as my TWSBI pens (Making this pen 5 in my collection), with a similar vision in mind: trying the big stub nibs. This one sports a CM / Italic / 1.0mm stub. My first impression upon getting the pen was overwhelmingly positive: this is a solidly built pen and the Retro Pop Red colour was very much like a larger version of the red Fisher Space Pen which had been my stalwart companion through the huge amount of solo travel I did in my 20s as a graduate student.
Image Description: A pair of red pens with scissors and washi tape also in the picture. the pen on top is the Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop Red and the one below is a Fisher Space Pen. Both pens share a similar “cigar” shape and red metallic body, but the Metropolitan is wider and longer.
I was even delighted to see the bladder filing mechanism, as that matched the pen I’d used as a teenager and I didn’t even know anyone made those any more!
My first day writing with it I was just as happy as I was with the TWSBI pens. I was imagining buying a small set of different colours and having them inked up in thematic colours for each month of my journal. It was going to be elegant and perfect.
And then the next day I went to use it, the pen stopped working.
I’ll save you the journey of frustration I had and say that there were a few things in play here:
The ink I chose was not a good fit with this pen. I hadn’t realized when chose an ink sample in lower light that it was going to be so sparkly. I spent a lot of time cleaning the pen.
The reservoir was small enough that I was also running out of ink.
I couldn’t always tell which thing was going wrong.
After a month of fighting with it, I felt like I’d spent more time cleaning and refilling than actually writing with the thing. I kept “running out of ink” (or getting clogged) halfway through journal entries. The low ink/dried out feel was leaving me with a scratchy, unpleasant writing experience, and I was starting to wonder if I had a bad pen or what. So I swapped in the ink cartridge that came with it, thinking it was probably going to give me the best experience with the pen anyhow.
… and it promptly ran dry in the middle of the sentence the first time I tried to use it.
In hindsight, I probably needed to wait for the ink to saturate the nib more, or maybe I got unlucky with a bubble? I hadn’t used a cartridge in years and the instructions basically just said to give it a gentle squeeze or two, which was clearly not enough. I put the pen nib-down for a rest and left it there for a couple of days until I was done being mad at it.
And it’s been perfect ever since.
Image Description: A pair of red pens with scissors and washi tape also in the picture. the pen on top is the Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop Red and the one below is a Fisher Space Pen. Both pens share a similar “cigar” shape and red metallic body, but the Metropolitan is wider and longer. This time the pens have both been uncapped into a regular writing configuration for me, showing that the space pen with the cap “posted” on the back is of similar length to the unposted Metropolitan.
It would be funny to just end on that note, but I’ll add a bit more: I am slowly falling back in love with this pen now that it’s got appropriate ink in it. I picked up some Pilot Iroshizuku ink samples since many people recommended them as being better “behaved” so I’m hopeful that I’ll have a good experience when the cartridge runs out, and if those work out I’ll spring for bottles. I’m unlikely to buy cartridges but I’ve got a syringe so I might try cleaning and refilling this one — I think it’s holding a lot more ink than I was getting in the bladder-thing. I guess I could try using the syringe to top up the bladder so running out of ink doesn’t happen as often? I also picked up a clear converter so I can try that out and see if being able to check ink levels quickly makes my life better.
When it’s writing well and not having ink issues, the Pilot 1.0 stub is very similar to the TWSBI 1.1stub that I loved (see previous post) but being a bit thinner, it fits better in my calendar pages and results in a slightly more legible handwriting for me. I feel like it’s less smooth, but I can’t decide if that’s because I keep expecting it to run out of ink now or a real thing.
In summary: this pen and I had a really rough start, but I learned a lot about pen cleaning and ink and I think we’ll work well together now. I still kind of want to collect all the colours, but this one highlighted that I should probably try a few more nibs and that maybe the Pilot wasn’t going to be the pen of my dreams for trying all the most sparkly ink. But wow, it’s a lovely pen, and I’m glad I can finally understand why it makes so many people’s beginner fountain pen lists.
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.
After a few months of using my mystery wood pen and the Pilot Varsity that I picked up when I bought ink for the first pen, I decided I was clearly having enough fun that I should add a few more pens to my collection.
Image Description: A pair of pens and washi tapes sitting on my bullet journal from Kela Designs which is green and features a drawing of a corgi embossed in gold. The clear pen on top is the TWSBI ECO-T and the light blue one on the bottom is the TWSBI Swipe.
So pen number 3 and 4 were a pair of TWSBI pens. I chose the ECO-T specifically because of the triangular grip since I suspected I could use some grip help. Then I saw the estimated shipping date and realized I might not get it before my next trip, so I panic-bought the Swipe from another vendor, justifying it because it has an interesting set of filling mechanisms. I probably should have gotten different nibs on them, but I was really excited about trying the 1.1mm stub nib so I got it on both. I also picked up a Pilot Metropolitan with a 1mm stub at the same time so that’s number 5. (How long before I give up on assigning them numbers?)
Back when I was a teenager with a repetitive strain injury, I’d been told that I should write bigger, try a fountain pen, and adopt a “messy” and more flowing cursive to make things easier on my hands. Yes, my “bad” handwriting was medically recommended! The 1.1 stub sounded like it could well be the perfect nib for my teenage self to force the big writing, and although that initial injury has long healed, I still rely on my hands to do my day job and my hobbies and well, everything. Spending months unable to use your hands correctly really showcases how many things you do with them. (I 100% do not recommend this experience.) I’ve been very cautious about hand over-use and very aware of how my hands feel ever since, and it’s been good for my other hobbies and work ergonomics.
The TWSBI pens and the 1.1 stub nibs turned out to be everything I hoped. It did take a bit of practice to remember to write more in a calligraphy style and watch the direction in which I dragged the pen, but I had taken calligraphy classes as a child so I actually had a lot of experience writing with a wider nib. I did have a few incidents where I forgot to let the page dry a little bit since these pens put out so much more ink than my first two pens, but thankfully there wasn’t too much smearing and spotting before I got into the right habits.
I will say that my handwriting continues to be illegible, but it’s definitely worse with the big nibs in some ways. I wrote a birthday card to my mom with the ECO-T and making it legible was harder than usual but also kind of more satisfying because it felt like calligraphy. Given my history, I’m totally fine with my handwriting being what it is so it doesn’t bother me, but it does point to me maybe choosing a different pen when I’m writing cards and letters or being very intentional about my writing.
What does matter to me is that I write a lot more with this pen. I’ve been writing journals for years and years, but switched to a bullet journal style at the start of 2023 (just a bit shy of 2 years ago) so my journal entries suddenly became more variable sized instead of “mostly fitting into a pre-printed daily/weekly journal slot” and there are more todo lists involved. At the start of 2023 I was typically writing a few sentences, but since I got the fountain pens and especially the TWSBI ECO-T, I find myself writing more. It started because I had to write a bit bigger so I had to take up more space, but since I got these pens in July I can see my entries getting longer and longer as it became easier and more fun to write with them. (And they were already longer in May-June with my first two fountain pens!) We’ll see if that keeps up over the next year, or whether it’s mostly a “new obsession” kind of thing. My interest in journalling tends to wax and wane normally so I’m not going to fret if I start writing less in future.
The filling mechanisms made less of a difference in writing, but I’m still constantly amused by watching the ink dribble over the big spring in the TWSBI Swipe as I flip it over, so it serves a purpose as a fidget. Because the ink tends to get “stuck” on the spring, I find myself tapping it every time I use the pen. So that was a surprising little bonus: I’d expected entertainment once per fill, not once per write!
Both of my orders arrived in time for the flight, and I did try bringing the TWSBI ECO-T on the plane but made a noob mistake about tightening and then forgot to put the pen upright and I wound up with a tiny leak on the way out. I was pretty annoyed with myself since I’d done a bunch of reading before the flight and thought I knew what I was doing! The leak was well contained in a plastic bag so no big deal. Unfortunately, my other mistake was that I’d grabbed a Field Notes notebook for the trip but didn’t try the pen with it, and it turns out I kind of hated them together. Some of it was that I’d gotten a bit of water in the pen when I cleaned it up after the flight, so the ink was more watery and bled through, but some of it was just that the very wide nib and the dark ink left a lot of ghosting and having gotten spoiled with the thick bamboo paper in my usual bullet journal I just felt like I’d made bad choices and wound up using gel pens and pencil on the trip after all that fuss of getting a pen in time so I would actually write on vacation. You can see the difference on my pen testing page below:
Image Description: A variety of pen names and ink names writen on a testing page of my notebook. Of particular note is the “organics studio nitrogen” sample which shows a dark blue ink with pink edges, then hte one below which says “organics studio accidentally diluted?” and shows a much lighter blue ink with less sheen. If you read them all you can get a preview of the other pens I’ll be talking about later in this series.
Oh well. I won’t blame the pen for the leaks (it was fine on the way back), but I think I’d want a smaller nib for the smaller notebook, and probably lighter ink in my travel pen so ghosting wouldn’t bug me so much. If I switch notebooks, though, I might want to consider taking the Swipe and cartridges as an option with less risk of leakage on the plane. I expect I’ll iterate over my travel setup quite a few more times before I’m through. (And as I said in a previous entry, I’m always happy to hear about other people’s travel setups if you want to share a link or a personal recommendation!)
Back home after the trip I made friends with the pen again and all was well. Some of that was helped by the Organics Studio Nitrogen ink I have in the ECO-T to this day, which I thought was going to be a boring blue when I put it in the pen because I was just grabbing samples out of a bag without looking them up. But it has this glorious pink shiny thing going on and I love it. I had a moment of panic when my sample vial ran low and I couldn’t find it in stock anywhere, but it came back in stock and I’ve now got my first full ink bottle in my collection. I think I’m going to have to clear out the drawer with my washi tape & stickers and make some space for inks!
Image Description: A much smaller notebook’s pen testing page, showing my wood pen in Diamine Marine (teal ink), the TWSBI Swipe 1.1stub in Noodler’s Southwest Sunset (orange ink), the Pilot Metropolitan 1.0 stub in Diamine Red Lustre (red ink), the TWSBI ECO-T 1.1. in Organics Studio Nitrogen (blue/pink), the Pilot Varsity (dark purple), the Pilot Kakuno in Jaques Herbin Violette Pensee (light purple), and the TWSBI Eco M in Diamine Apple Glory (green)
I feel almost like I should apologize for not having bigger writing samples to show here, but since I mostly use the pens for journaling I don’t really have anything I want to post pictures of on the internet! I’ve been rotating through lesser-used crafts as part of my fiber goals this year, and while writing wasn’t exactly on my original planned list, I declared this month “writing month” and I’ve been trying to do more unfiltered writing about my day and stuff as well as things like these blog posts. Yes, I chose writing for this month in part because it fit well with my new pen obsession. I used to write a lot as a hobby and part of the Geek Feminism blog, but I fell out of the habit for a bunch of reasons: some of it was good choices in self care, some was fear of harassment, a lot was about having a kid and not getting as much time to sit with a keyboard anymore. It’s been fun to skip the keyboard for part of this month’s goals, but it does mean a lot of writing that I don’t want to share. Maybe I should take up what other people do and copy some poems or a book as part of my pen testing to make these more interesting? Or maybe I should let it go and just focus on the written words I want to share instead of making more work for myself. Since you’re seeing this without extensive pen testing, you know what choice I made.
These two pens very quickly became my favourites, which is maybe not a surprise since their initial competition was “a wooden pen with a nib that could be better” and “a disposable fountain pen” but it was still lovely to have them work out so well. If I’m going to write a longer entry, these are the pens I grab.
Having these two pens that I like so much did raise the question of “what do I actually want my pen collection to look like?” — I could probably buy 1-2 more of these and cover my basic needs for journalling, spend money on cool inks, and be pretty satisfied in theory. But I know me, and I’m going to want to try more things to see if there’s anything I like better. I have a large collection of knitting needles of different types and shapes, and I used to sample some at the local yarn store as well for the same reason. Ergonomics can be deeply personal and I know the knitting setup that works best for endurance for me took a while to build, and I expect the same will be true about writing and fountain pens. Plus, just like knitting, I’m expecting to want different pens for a few different things: see my problems with these pens as travel companions, for example. Since there’s a variety of cheaper pens available, I expect that I’ll keep rotating through different nibs and brands for a while. And I’ll enjoy having some options for doodling even if they don’t all wind up as my regular writing pens. So this could easily have been the end of my pen journey, but I think it’s likely going to be a journey I’m on for quite a while.
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.
A few months ago, I found a fountain pen in a drawer. It was a gift from someone who knew me as a teenager, when I had tendinitis and used a fountain pen as a way to reduce strain during writing. I didn’t have ink when I got it and I likely forgot all about buying some to try it out after the chaos of unpacking from the holidays.
Image Description: A fountain pen with a light coloured wooden body and gold and black accents. It is sitting on teal fabric with birds and flowers on it.
It’s a pretty little thing, with turned wood. Maybe my friend turned it, maybe it was a craft fair find, it’s been so long since I received it that I don’t actually remember! It had almost certainly been sitting in that drawer since 2019 or earlier. But this time I pulled it out I looked at it and thought, “this is too nice to sit in a drawer forever, I should buy some ink.”
I hadn’t actually used a fountain pen in close to 3 decades. Back in high school, I had eventually recovered from the tendinitis and learned to take notes on a laptop even though this was so unusual at the time that teachers and then professors would come over to snoop and see if I was really taking notes and not playing games. (As an aside, I never did play games as it turns out it was shockingly difficult to learn to learn while typing, but that’s another whole story about brains and learning and habits.) I gave the fountain pen I’d borrowed back to my dad and it’s probably in a drawer somewhere with the bottle of ink I never finished in the 90s. (Now that I’m writing this, I really hope one of us thought to clean the pen. My dad probably did, but I’m going to have to go look next time I visit.)
I assume that a lot has changed in the fountain pen world in 3 decades, but for all I know there were fancy inks back then that I just never bothered to look up because I had one pen, one bottle of ink, and writing caused me so much pain that I was mostly trying to find a way to avoid it. Although I had a couple of friends/classmates who used fountain pens because I went to that kind of nerd school, I definitely wasn’t seeking out fountain pen aficionados on usenet back then. So I was a little overwhelmed when I went to buy ink in May and suddenly had to learn a whole new vocabulary of sheen and shimmer. With some help from the fountain pen community on Mastodon, I chose a small sampler of inks to try and picked up a “disposable” fountain pen so I would have some basic reference point in case it turned out my wood pen was a complete dud.
Image Description: Doodles with a green fountain pen. Most are abstract shapes and squiggles but there’s also a shaggy dog face reminiscent of my grandparents’ dog Mitzi.
But the pen worked! It’s got a little reservoir so I didn’t have to guess about cartridges. I’ve had a couple of different inks in it now and have been using it regularly since May (it’s September now, so it’s been a bit more than 4 months). It’s been a bit of a learning curve but most of it’s coming back to me. I’ve had to learn about how to keep it from drying out, something that wasn’t as much of an issue when I was a high schooler writing pages and pages of notes ever day, but it’s definitely more of an issue for me as an adult who writes a few sentences or maybe half a page. I had to look up pen cleaning techniques in case I was missing anything important, but changing inks and having what looks on paper like an entirely different pen is magical.
But the down side is that the nib merely ok: if you can look at it closely there’s some things slightly askew, and a bit of research suggests that it’s a random mass produced nib that can have very variable quality depending on where it was made. The Pilot Varsity disposable pen that I bought for $3.50 when I got my ink is generally a smoother writer. This mystery pen tends to skip and dries out a bit more quickly than I’d like, and I’m kind of afraid to put really sparkly inks into it because I have no idea if it’s going to clog horribly. (And I do rather want to play with sparkly inks, but I’d rather not spend hours cleaning them out of a pen that’s not suited for them.)
Image description. A fountain pen and its shadow. The pen has a wooden body and a nib that is gold and silver coloured with “iridium point Germany” and some decorative elements on it.
The issues this pen has may be fixable, but I’m not comfortable doing it myself (yet) so a new beginner pen is less expensive to me than my time. I’m trying to pace myself on buying new pens so that I spend at least a little while using each random starter pen I’m trying and getting to see how they work over a month or two, but I can already tell you that this one’s days as a regular journalling pen are likely numbered. I’m currently loving it for adding tiny art to my journal pages (see the tooth below), but it gets frustrating if I try to write more than a few lines with it. It’s only a matter of time before I find a smoother nib that I like better.
Image Description: A kawaii style tooth drawn in light blue (using my wood pen) with a face on it and some lines around it in orange. There are some words from a journal entry visible around the drawing but not enough of them to make a sentence.
I’m always going to love this for being the pen that got me excited about fountain pens again. Thankfully even though it’s only a so-so writer, it’s lovely to look at with the wood and brass accents. When something else takes its slot in my bullet journal bag, it’ll get a nice retirement to the cup on my desk where I can admire it, and maybe it’ll get re-inked occasionally for art and accent colour.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
