terriko

Time for a mid-year check in on how my Creative Goals 2026 are progressing! I’m a bit later than usual because I was busy doing some other creative projects at exactly the 6 month exact-middle-of-the-year point, which honestly feels like a good sign.

1. Set up my new creative space

This has been such a joy!  My new office is still messy and filled with boxes that I haven’t quite figured out how to unpack, but it reached functional early on and has been going through a lot of refinement.

Some highlights:

• I’ve co-opted the glider chair we bought when I was pregnant and I used for late-night nursing when my kid was little.  It’s now my reading and knitting and writing space and I love it.


• I put curtains on the window so I don’t have to use the finicky blinds and it’s made such a difference.  They still need hemming but I at least know where my sewing machine is even if I haven’t got it set up so that’s something.


• I rearranged my vintage yellow table and crummy apartment ikea desk so they function like an L-shaped desk and I’ve got enough space for painting during long corporate rah rah business quarterlies.  Or just painting because I feel like it.  It’s great.  I probably need to upgrade the lousy ikea desk but this works while I figure out exactly what would suit me best.


• I got a pegboard to put in the tiny space behind the door when it’s open, and the little shelves on those have been great for putting up art and organizing stuff that I’m more likely to use if I can see it.  After I took the picture below I put up two more above and below so it’s a full wall of art and supplies.

My reading/writing area in my office by the window, showing lots of mess but also the new curtains, the comfy glider chair, and the pegboard art setup on the wall.

Some lowlights:

• The office is noisy when the AC is going strong and too cold in the winter.  It’s got 2 exterior walls and one that backs onto the garage, and I suspect the garage one in particular doesn’t have enough insulation (it was noticeably colder than the two exterior walls), but it could be all three causing varying amounts of cold.  We’ve hacked things by plastic coating the window which helped but I also had blankets and even a small electric heater in here for when it got too cold.


• I still own too much yarn, so not all of it fits on the shelves.  Having this visible and in my space is really reducing the amount of shopping I want to do, but I’m going to have to make some decisions about how to handle the rest of the shelving because I don’t love having 13 giant plastic bins plus a pile of smaller ones in here that i have to rearrange every time I want something in one of them.


• I don’t have a setup for my spinning wheel, which is a bit of a shame and it’s part of why I didn’t do tour de fleece this year: I forgot but could have joined late if setting up hadn’t felt like a hassle. I’ve got a new espinner coming and it should fit nicely on the painting table or the table by my glider, so I think that’s going to be the plan for spinning for the next 6 months anyhow while I get to really know the new gear.

Despite those annoyances, I’m really happy with how things are taking shape.  I’ve unpacked all the boxes I found that seemed to belong here and rearranged stuff into various plastic bins for now while I decide what stays and what goes.  I spend a lot of time in my office writing and just enjoying my space on top of the times I need to be in here for work or to play our regular guild wars 2 night.

Dahlia watercolour painting (from a book exercise).

And on top of all that, kid and I have co-opted the last upstairs bedroom to be a craft room!

• Nice big table right under the window for painting and drawing, with two chairs for us to sit.


• Single bed for sitting on and so it can be used as an emergency guest bedroom or “Everyone has allergies and is snoring really loud” option.


• My sewing machine desk is up here, though I haven’t really set it up yet.


• I’m slowly migrating the craft supplies into the closet.


• We replaced the light with one that doesn’t make a horrible high pitched noise that only my kid can hear.  (most of this house has ancient halogens and some of them are bad enough that I can hear them but this particular one was out of my hearing range)

We use this to paint or draw pretty regularly, sometimes because I’m doing daily drawings and just invite my kid to join me, but often he’ll instigate drawing time too.  We got some really cute how to draw chibi dogs and birds books plus I’ve got a rotating set of painting books out of the library, so there’s always inspiration or lessons to try.  I think J had some vision of our craft space being in the basement, but honestly the lighting is so nice in this room that I don’t think we’ll be moving even when we finally get the basement into a usable state (it’s currently a disaster of half-unpacked boxes, but thankfully not an outright disaster since we were spared the flooding that hit a lot of our neighbours).

2. Crafting for my new climate

Made a sweater for me, a fluffy scarf for my kid, and I’m still slowly working on that double-knit dr who scarf for J.  Plus I’m always always making more socks as bus/work/out-and-about knitting.  I kind of want to start another sweater but I think the scarf will never get done if I do so that’s probably all the projects for this year unless my kid wants something.

Time of the Doctor double knit scarf, about half-finished.

3. Painting with Fountain Pen Ink

I have done *so* much painting.  Relatively little of it actually included fountain pen ink, but the skills I’m building will transfer so I’m not too concerned that I’ve abandoned this goal.  I had the idea that I’d paint with the leftovers from my pens every month, but it turns out that because I choose fairly contrast-heavy colours they don’t blend well and I did’t like the way they looked when I tried them in a single piece at the end of the month in one of those ink colouring books.  Trying to plan out colours and spread them across a bunch of pages and hope I eventually used inks that went well with them didn’t seem like fun to me, so I’m going to regroup and try something else.  Here’s today’s effort, using some “leftover” ink (Teranishi Guitar Brilliant Mint, I think?):

A notebook with two dogs painted in watercolour. The top one is labeled “Doggust 2026 Dunker” and features a beagle-like dog with a striking grey dappled pattern on middle and tail that contrasts with the tan and white on the rest of the dog. The one below that is not labelled but features a white and black Tibetan Terrier with long sweeping hair, and the area around the dog is coloured in a bright blue-teal using the Brilliant Mint fountain pen ink.

The fountain pen ink definitely beheaves differently than the watercolours (doesn’t quite absorb the same way on the paper) but I think I might be able to have some fun making my doggust stuff more colourful and maybe even sparkly while I make use of some little leftovers in sample vials and inks that I didn’t love in pens.

Other than that, I’m really enjoying painting in general and I’m excited to keep doing that!

A couple of flower painting exercises on my beloved vintage yellow table. They depict a magnolia and snowdrop.

4. Write for joy

My biggest writing project in the first half of the year was for a fandom event and I have never ever gotten so many comments on a work.  It was a really playful story and as a result my readers were having fun, I was having fun, it was absolutely the bringer of joy.

Beyond that, I’ve been trying out some weekly prompts, joining events, did a fanfic gift exchange, and I’ve just been having such a good time with fanfic and writing.   I’m constantly entertained that my new fan writer community is not entirely dissimilar to my open source communities — I supposed it’s not surprising since they’re both the sort of people who put things for free into the world, even if the skills they’re sharing are different.  And as I’ve mentioned before, it’s been really motivating to have “sprinting buddies” so there’s folk to write with even if we barely interact other than cheering each other on and gossiping in between timed writing sessions. Having a little community continues to be a source of joy and motivation.

I’m also starting to add a bit writing about life to my monthly posts here.  Nothing fancy and carefully thought out, but it’s nice as a warm up.  I’ve got some ideas for more technical blog posts I’d like to write but haven’t made the time yet because writing fiction is more fun.  That said, I should have some writing opportunities at work and I’m hoping to take advantage of that as I find them!

Overall, I think I’m doing well on goals, but I am going to have to push myself a bit to try more fountain pen ink art experimentation, so hopefully that’ll come up more in the last chunk of the year.  And if not, my painting practice has improved my life regardless of what supplies I’m using!

Hot and thunderstorm-y so far this July.  Went downtown for Canada Day and had regrets — so hot, so loud — but the war museum was air conditioned.  Kid noped out just in time for us to get on the train and back to the car before the skies opened and the thunder and lightning started.  Then we had a long power outage at home as the thunderstorms rolled in, the patio door started leaking a very small amount, and the neighbour’s fence fell on our car (no visible damage, though!).  It was simultaneously too exciting and also incredibly boring, but I got lots of reading done while the dog lay nervously over my legs, stirring to look at the strange noises or to complain if I stopped petting him to turn the page.

RCMP Musical Ride. There is one black horse with mountie rider holding a lance in the foreground, and the others are visible in the outdoor arena below, all standing at attention for the lowering of the flag at sunset.

We had a much nicer time at the RCMP musical ride on the weekend before.  The show hasn’t changed much since I was a kid except for updates to the pop music they used, but it was a nice night and my kid got to go pet a horsie’s nose after the show so he was satisfied with the experience.  The governor general’s foot guard band played some numbers too, which was a delight for me as someone who played a lot of concert band gigs in parks over the years.  (This is the longest I’ve gone without a band since I was in elementary school and it feels weird to be so out of practice, but I’m not quite up to joining a band again right now.  Playing music was so much of my life but choir filled the gap until we moved.)

July 2026 Journal Supplies

A new A5 notbook with a camper van vibe, three sticker sheets, three pens and inks.

New Notebook!

I picked up a cute Mugobuni camper van themed A5 notebook from an art store in Toronto (they had the Traveler’s Notebook half-year weekly calendar I wanted).  I think I’d seen some Mugobuni art on stationery blogs a pen store blog post or maybe they did stickii or something because the name and style feel vaguely familiar?  I guess they’re based in Toronto just like the art store. The notebook was something like CAD $10 so I wasn’t expecting anything too fancy, but it’s pretty nice: 20 sheets / 40 pages (around my favourite size!), sewn spine, rounded corners, cute cover, dot grid that seems to be 6mm spaced.  Now, 6mm spaced is fantastic for me with larger pens, but alas, the paper did not like my twsbi eco 1.1 stub and I got a bunch of bleedthrough.   Then the flex nib had the same problem if I flexed it.  And even my Pilot Medium had a few dots seeping through.

In the end, I swapped the Eco to have a medium nib and ditched the Monza for a Preppy in a fine, plus I tried all the other pens I still had inked on the page.  No serious problems, so it seems like the eco 1.1 and the flex were just bad ideas but it’s otherwise pretty fountain pen friendly paper!

Inside of the Mugoubuni notebook with a page trying different pens/inks. My new lineup of pens for this month is sitting on the blank right hand page beside the writing.

Stickers

All of these from the June 2026 pack from stickii.

• Flower Icons from CoCo MoMo


• Produce doggies from Yumbrite


• Gardening friends from Hello Yonnie

Pens and Inks

• Glow green TWSBI Eco <M> – Diamine Apple Glory.  I had started with a 1.1 stub but it was bleeding through the paper.  Swapped to the medium and it seems fine now.


• Pilot E95S <M> – Pilot Iroshizuku ama-iro.  Also reading a bit wet on this paper but not bad enough to swap.


• REMOVED: Monteverde Monza <flex> – Diamine Red Lustre.  This combo of ink/nib/paper didn’t work and it was too skippy and scratchy, so I’ve swapped it out already on day 3.


• Platinum Preppy Wa <fine> (red gourd) – Red cartridge from Platinum.  I tried this with the Diamine Red Lustre but the results were, uh, lackluster, so I switched to the cartridge.  That ink may need some dilution at this point but I might just swap it into the paint box.


• Platinum Preppy Wa <fine> (blue koi) – original black cartridge.  Normally this is my todo list pen but it’s nice on this paper so it got promoted back to journalling.

Notes from Last Month

The Conklin Durograph did grow on me with practice and I found it considerably more usable than I remembered.   But while I liked using it for copying quotes and it wasn’t causing me pain to use it, but it still wasn’t the pen I wanted to reach for much this month.  The plan is to clean it out and tuck it away in the drawer for now and mentally slot it on the giveaway list if an opportunity to make someone else happy arises.  No hurry since pens don’t take up much space.

Both the Pilot Metropolitans and the Dominant Industry inks were great and they’re moving over to my work notebook next.  The green pen did dry out a bit by the end of the month so I’ll keep an eye on it.

The Monza got swapped out last month for my Kaweco Liliput with the same ink.  Turns out a large blob of shimmer had gotten stuck on the lid and once I got it mixed in the ink behaved as expected, so it probably wasn’t the Monza’s fault that it failed at shimmer in June.  But of course now I’m trying paper that can’t handle the flex nib… this poor Monza can’t catch a break. It’s slated to get cleaned out and ignored for now since there’s no point in trying it again on this paper.  Unlike the Durograph which is heavy and has a wide nib, this one’s light and has multiple nibs so I’ll try it for things like my work notebook and give it a fairer shot with more cooperative ink before it gets shelved.

MD notebook with stickers on the top of the cover.

I was glad to see the MD Paper notebook finished.  It’s reasonably priced, has the smaller number of pages that I prefer, I like that the simple cover lends itself to sticker decorations, and I actually enjoyed using it for drawing.  Unfortunately, the drawing seemed to result in too much hand oil on the page rendering parts of it useless for fountain pen ink or causing random skipping in pens that I know normally perform well.  If I used a shield to write/draw it was fine, but I found myself hesitant to use it and drawing in other notebooks instead which … I mean, that’s fine but I kind of want to also draw in my journals?  Even if I don’t do it that often?

Drawing exercises from Kawaii Doggies and Kawaii Birdies, shown in my MD Paper notebook.

I’m also kind of tired of the ghosting through the paper.  It’s not unusable or anything, but I feel like I’d probably be happier with thicker paper, especially since I prefer notebooks in the smaller page count range so I can afford to use thicker paper without it being too much.   So in the end, like the Conklin Durograph, this MD notebook is perfectly fine and I can use it but it’s not sparking joy for me. I’d been hoping I could just pick up these 3-packs of notebooks and have a default journaling notebook that was relatively easy to get in Canada, but alas I don’t think they’re the right choice.  Alas!  I’ll use the other two eventually, but in the meantime I do still have several years worth of paper to try so it’s not urgent that I find the perfect one yet.

We’ve made it to June!  One more month left in the school year, and everything’s all leafed out and green and glorious.  I’m enjoying the instability of the weather with the wind and sun and rain alternating so you never get bored.  And we’re slowly discovering our garden as new things bloom every few days.  I have lilacs now!  I missed those since I moved away from Old Ottawa South where the neighbour’s bush was so huge I felt like I had my own.  But now I do have my own!  They’re almost done but the roses seem to be starting next.

Bright pink rose blosso in my yard.

I did have a strange flare of allergies for a few hours this morning, but mostly I’ve been good to just enjoy my new/old habitat except for one week of sniffles that might have been miserable except I enjoyed the excuse to WFH.  (I don’t have regular seasonal allergies, but I do hit something once every few years.)  My poor dog is desperate to get let out on the deck but the yard isn’t fenced yet and he already ran out onto the bike path the one time I let him into the yard off leash to see if he’d stay behind the bushes, so he’s stuck on a leash for now.  Looking forwards to when he and I can just hang out in the yard without a tether, though.

June 2026 Stationery choices: sticker sheets featuring birds and foxes and forest-y motifs, 4 pens and inks (all described further in the post)

Stickers

• Seasonal birds from Mind Wave (for tracking days that I write)


• Sparkly orange birds from byjessicaelena.com (via stickii)


• Foxes and forest vibes by campmustelid.com (via stickii)

I finally decided to try an actual stickii subscription starting this month.  It’s too many stickers per month for my usage so I either need to go more nuts with the stickers or skip months occasionally, but I really missed getting a monthly surprise in the mail.  Maybe that’s a bad reason but I love the artists they get in and it’s a hard time to be an artist right now and if I’m going to spend money on a surprise pack, affordable sticker sheets and paying for art that I will use eventually seems pretty reasonable.   I use 2-3 sticker sheets per month right now and I think they send 7 so they’re definitely going to pile up, but also they’re sticker sheets so they’re small and my current binders are getting pretty empty at the moment so it’s not like it would be if I was adding to my already overflowing yarn collection.  (I bought two balls of yarn this year and I’m cut off until I knit at least the one for this month’s knitalong.  Which I haven’t started because I’m already doing a different knitalong but soon!)  We’ll see if I can manage to cut myself off once the sticker binders start to get full.

After a year of mostly not spending thanks to unemployment and then the large number of costs we incurred thanks to the move, it’s been nice to pick up some art supplies and the occasional book, as well as slowly working out my new charitable donations and subscriptions.  I’m trying to choose a few treats and causes so I feel like I’m contributing to the things I care about financially and also not like 100% of my salary is going to bills.

Fountain Pens & Inks

• Pilot Metropolitan <M> (green) – Dominant Industry Tuna & Olives (Wonder Pen Exclusive)


• Pilot Metropolitan <CM> (red) – Dominant Industry Ginger Chicken (Wonder Pen Exclusive)


• Monteverde Monza <flex> (clear) – KWZ all that glitters Stardust Blue


• Conklin Durograph <stub> (green) – Diamine Laurel

The green Metropolitan is new (from Wonder Pens, bought with the ink).  It had been living in my work stationery setup with much success before I swapped it in to the journal instead.  I love this ink and pen combo. This one came with a twist piston converter instead of a squeeze converter, which is nice because while I don’t mind the squeeze converter you can’t tell how much ink is left so I had eventually replaced the one on my original red metro.  I wonder when they changed that?

The older red Metropolitan with Ginger Chicken in it is also great.  I’ve had a lot of mis-matches with that pen but this ink seems to be a great fit, maybe one of the ones I’ve liked most in that pen so far, since that nib needs an ink that’s… lubricated? wet? smooth?  I’m not sure what the issue is but you can really feel it when the ink isn’t working out in the CM nib because it feels all scratchy and awkward.  I love this nib but it’s definitely not as easy to use as the medium.

The Monza, however, is not working out very well and it apparently ate all the glitter — a bit of a surprise since I’ve never had a problem with the KWZ “all that glitters” line before!  Normally it’s so glittery that I can barely see the base colour but the one line I’ve written with the Monza so far had zero.  The Monza was an impulse buy on super sale because it comes with three nibs (fine, medium and flex) plus converters so I figured I’d like at least one of them.  But it’s such a boring looking pen that I’m not really compelled to pick it up, so it hasn’t been inked much.  I thought a shimmer ink might help make it more fun, but this one clearly isn’t working out and it’s the shimmer ink I’ve had the least trouble with in other pens so maybe the feed just isn’t great for shimmer?  Not sure.  I’ll give it a few more tries because one line of text isn’t a fair test and I haven’t used it for a full journal entry yet, but I may swap the ink into a different pen before the month is done.  This pen is a good candidate for my work setup since it’s small, light, and has a good clip, so it may get used there next with a brighter standard ink instead.

The Conklin has also been sitting in a drawer for a while: another impulse buy at deep discount that I didn’t love once it arrived. It’s a really lovely pen that writes beautifully, but it hurts my hands to use for too long and I’m not sure why.  It doesn’t seem that much heavier than my other pens, or bigger.  I have other stub nibs so I don’t think it’s the extra effort of writing with the stub.  It doesn’t feel scratchy or anything.  But it’s… tiring.  Maybe it’s where the weight sits?  Something about the ergonomics of that pen is just not for me, and maybe this is one of those pens I wouldn’t have bought if I’d gone to a store in person and tried it.   I’m going to give it a bit of a go this month since it’s been so long since I used it, but I suspect it’ll wind up earmarked to give away to someone who will love it more.  It’s great with this ink and it is writing well so far this month, but there’s not much point in me keeping a pen that I don’t want to use because it makes my hand feel bad.

Usage notes from last month

Tried two new pens last month.  Neither is completely new to me because I’ve used similar things, but the physical pens themselves aren’t ones I’d used before.  So how’d that go?

A peach 30th anniversary Sailor Fude with birthday sparkles on it, set against a rainbow rug.

The Sailor Fude pictured above is from Toronto Pen Shop and thus one of my 2026 orders. I love the fude nib dip pen that I have from them and had long wanted a pen, but the colours were uninspiring to me.  When I found that there was a sparkly limited edition version for their 30th anniversary I picked one up.  I absolutely love writing with it, which is not a surprise since it’s pretty similar to the dip pen nib I use for all my swatching and first writing attempts with each new ink.  The feed keeps it a bit less wet than the sort-of-feed that comes with my dip pen which is basically a little plastic cover that holds a drop of ink in rather than something that keeps a steady flow.  This feed is nicer and more consistent, as one might expect.  I also tried inking some drawings with it with black ink (before I filled it up with the Brilliant Mint) and that was fun although I think I prefer the fineliner I normally use since it has waterproof ink and I can paint over it.  I’ve been doing a lot of watercolour lately!  The thing that surprised me most about this pen is that it is waaaay longer than my other pens, to the point where I have to kind of angle it into the pen case I usually use.  That said, I really enjoyed writing with it so I expect it’ll get inked up every few months.

I *did* have to rinse out the Sailor Fude nib because it felt like it was drying out this month, something I seldom need to do unless I keep an ink in for more than a month, but I’m hesitant to blame the pen because I’ve had a lot of pen skipping since I switched to the MD Paper grid notebook I’m currently using.  I strongly suspect that it’s something about the way the oils on my hands react to the paper, and since I’d been using the MD paper for drawing as well as journal writing, I’d been touching it a lot more than usual.  This wasn’t the ony pen that gave me trouble — I also had to rinse out my Kaweco Liliput in April multiple times and that’s a pen that’s never given me trouble before.  And I think a few of the others had occasional skips.   Trying to make things better, I moved my drawing to other notebooks/papers and started using a shield for my hand while writing and I’ve had less trouble.   I did notice when painting with the new inks that the grid itself takes ink a bit differently, so it could be also affecting me?  there’s a lot more printing in the grid vs the dot grid I usually use, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to cause the kind of “feels like your pen is drying out” skipping I’ve seen.  That said, this notebook is pleasant but is probably not going on my “to restock” list, and I might find a non-journal/non-fountain pen use for the other two that came in the pack.  I’ve got a bunch of other notebooks to try before I’m likely to come back to them anyhow!

Platinum Preppy Wa purple pen with cats on it. It’s sitting on a clear case containing blue and purple washi dots.

I had also picked up a new Platinum Preppy Wa pen last year that I hadn’t used yet — the purple one with the kitties on it — and because JetPens was doing a “get a free preppy with your order” I had also picked up a second regular Preppy with a wider nib and swapped the nibs.  The Preppy “medium” is a bit thicker than the Pilot medium, which I hadn’t realized, and it actually looked a lot like the Pelikan Pura Broad that I was using at the same time.  That was a surprise but not a bad one; I like thicker nibs for journal writing. Rather than cleaning out the purple Preppy I’ve moved it over to my work notebook and we’ll see if I like that nib there or if I switch back to the original thinner nib next time I use a Preppy for work notes.  I’m glad to have the option, though — mostly my Preppy Wa pens wind up on todo list duty right now so it’d nice to have a nib that I like for longer writing available.

Ooly Duo fountain pen/highlighter combo showing a crack by the orange highlighter end of the pen.

Bad news about the Ooly Writer’s Duo I’d been using: it’s developed a crack that is really annoying when you want to uncap the highlighter side, because the whole highlighter unit with the cartridge pulls out unless you pinch the pen body pretty aggressively.  It’s also developed a lot of cosmetic damage — scrapes on the gradient surface across the pen.  Looks like I paid $13 for the set of 3 a bit over a year ago, so this is the second cheapest fountain pen I own and a year of use isn’t bad, plus it got carried around a lot in my todo list bag even before I put it into my work set, but it’s not even out of ink on either side yet and I was surprised because I haven’t had even a random free conference pen fail like this in a long time.  The Platinum Preppy Wa pen with koi on it that was my other todo list notebook pen at the same time and basically got the same treatment is still going strong — no cracks, no damage to the artwork on the pen.  I don’t think I’d recommend the Ooly pen unless you’re intending to treat it as disposable OR you don’t tend to carry your pens around much.  But the fountain pen wrote well and I did enjoy using it this past year.  The highlighter tip is also looking a little beat up, but having it on hand for work notes turned out to be really handy, so much so that I wound up buying some other less neon highlighters to add to my kit.    I’ll keep using it until it’s out of ink but I’m not sure it’s going to be worth refilling the cartridge as I’d originally planned.  Maybe I’ll find a way to repurpose it, but it’s probably going to wind up at the back of my pen/ink drawer for a while once it runs out of ink.  I’ve got two more so they may go to live in my desk at work or at home when I finally get around to starting the cartridges, and we’ll see if they last better that way.

It’s been fun to add a bit to my collection with a couple of stationary orders, but I’m also enjoying rotating through older pens.  I’ve got some notebooks I’m eager to try and a lot of inks to play with over the coming months!  One thing I did do was sit down and organize my swatches.  I had been keeping the inkvent ones separately so I’d actually try all the new inks, but I decided it was time to integrate them so I can flip through a whole rainbow of colours instead.  I use an A5 binder with plastic card pages and papers cut to card size.  It’s made it a lot easier to choose a palette for the month.  I do need to label the pigment inks since those aren’t quite as obvious from the swatches as the shimmer and sheen inks are, but other than that I’m pretty happy with the new setup.  It’s helped me not be tempted to get any more ink, since I actually have the type of collection I wanted to have when i started this hobby now.  I’ll keep myself open to special inks like the Wonder Pens exclusive ones and I’ll see over the coming months if I find myself reaching for a colour that’s not there.  But it’s a good spread!  Now I just need to start more seriously working on that “painting with fountain pen ink” goal I set for myself.  I’ve done some but definitely not enough!