Tag: Dingbats

February 2024 in Pens and Paper

I started the month ready to spend the first half of it in hospital, with my dad. So the fountain pens I chose were all expendable pocketable pens that I was willing to have stolen (apart from the Schon Design Pocket 6 which was a leftover from January and never left my desk). So that meant I inked 4 Kaweco Sport fountain pens using various ink cartridges that I had on hand.

The portable lineup:

Once my dad got out of hospital and back home, I decided to celebrate by “shopping” from my collection. I inked up a Parker 51 Plum (use the good china!), a Parker Vacumatic, a Franklin Christoph 45L Turqish (spelled like that on their site) Crush that I had purchased but hadn’t inked before, and a vintage Radius Comet (because I heard that the brand was being revived).

The Franklin Christoph EF nib isn’t the best companion to the Eau de Nil as the ink tends to dry in the nib, causing hard start issues. The Radius is a flexible nib of the vintage kind, which means it’s really flexible and not just springy. It also rattles, which makes me not carry it around with me — it stays at home at my desk. The Leonardo is a beautiful pen with a beautiful ink that I refilled immediately — the only Inkvent 2023 ink I did that with. The two vintage Parkers are phenomenal, as usual. The extra fine nib on the vacumatic somehow really well with Diamine Ash, though I was worried at first that the combination would be too light to be readable. The Parker 51 Aeromatic is a treat to use. It’s the rare Plum colour, and it’s got a fantastic nib (as all 51’s have) which pairs very nicely with the Monteblanc The Beatles Psychedelic Purple.

In terms of paper I’ve been using Kokuyo A4 KB paper which I cut to half size (so A5) to manage my daily to do list. The paper is relatively cheap and very fountain pen friendly. I’m also able to use both sides of the page despite there being some show through.

Kokuyo A4 KB paper cut in half to A5 size. This is why standards are great.

I’ve got a Field Notes Heavy duty on my desk at home and at work, and I just bought a new stock of them. These are where I jot down quick notes, phone call details, doodles during boring meetings. When they’re filled up they get tossed out as nothing in them is permanent — everything important in them moves to somewhere else as I work my way through them.

Field Notes Heavy Duty pocket spiral bound reporter notebooks

I have finally found a use for my Dingbats notebooks (beyond giving them away as gifts, as I have in the past): this lined purple hippo one is my blog notebook. I discovered that I have a much easier, much quicker time writing blog posts if I first draft them on paper, and this is where I do it in. I’ll likely write a dedicated post to this notebook soon.

Dingbats Puple Hippo A5 lined notebook

Apart from them I still use the notebooks I used last month.

Pencils

I’ve been using the Drehgriffel Nr. 2 as my daily driver. I use pencils extensively to plan, as my plans tend to change, and there’s something about this solid little mechanical pencil that makes me want to use it.

Apart from that I brought two pencils into the rotation, to try to use. One is from my last purchase from the late and great C.W. Pencils Enterprise, and it’s the “Big Dipper” J.R. Moon Pencil Co 600. It’s an oversized pencil, the kind of pencil that kids who are learning to write are expected to use. I’ve been having pretty significant neuropathy in my hands lately and I thought that this would be nice and easy to use, as after all it’s designed for kids just learning to develop their fine motor skills. So far it’s been a disappointment – the eraser and ferrule make it very top heavy, and I’ve been having a hard time manipulating it. I can’t imagine kids using this pencil and having an easy time with it. I like the over the top red foil with gold writing look though, so I haven’t given up on it yet.

Big Dipper J.R. Moon 600

The second pencil is a Blackwing Volumes 56, the baseball themed one. The core is soft and dark, and I’ve been using it for quick and loose sketches. I’m trying to ease into one week 100 people by training myself to work faster than I normally would.

Blackwing Volumes 56

What did you use in February? Any planner changes? Pencil revelations? Pen preferences?

Dingbats Notebook Review

During my trip to London this year I managed to buy a few Dingbats Wildlife notebooks (the elephant, tiger, hippo and deer). They appealed to me because they present a vegan friendly, fountain pen friendly journaling option, with a unique take on the classic “Moleskinesque” notebook.

Purple front cover with hippo debossing.
Front cover

So while the Dingbats A5+ Wildlife notebook has rounded corners, an elastic closure, a back pocket and a ribbon bookmark, the textured vegan faux leather cover is here to make a statement. There’s a different animal debossing and different cover colour for each animal. Currently there’s a Cream Wolf (new), Grey Elephant, Green Deer, Orange Tiger, Purple Hippo, Blue Whale, Brown Bear, Black Duck and Red Kangaroo. Once again, I got a little carried away and bought the Elephant, Deer, Tiger and Hippo – all the Dingbat notebooks that I saw in WH Smith in Heathrow Terminal 5. If I had to choose just one I would go for the hippo or the tiger, depending on how much attention I felt like drawing to myself carrying the notebook around.

Back cover with a sticker explaining everything there is to know about the notebook.
Back cover with a sticker explaining everything there is to know about the notebook

The faux leather cover has a nice texture to it, and the debossing makes it stand out from more generic faux leather notebooks that you might find in stationary shops. It’s clearly there to call attention to itself.

Hippo debossing on a purple faux leather, textured cover.
Hippo on a purple faux leather, textured cover.

The front endpaper has hippo footprints on it (they differ by animal), a “This Dingbats notebook belongs to” box to write your details in (always to that. Here’s why), the Dingbats logo and two notices: one that 2% of its UK revenue is donated to the WWF, and another that the notebook is made with FSC certified paper and vegan materials only.

Front endpaper, with notices on the bottom left, logo on the bottom right, a "this notebook belongs to" box in the middle right and a background of hippo footprints, all printed in warm grey.
Front endpaper.

The back endpaper also comes with the hippo footprint, and it has a back pocket. The Dingbats Wildlife notebook also comes with a pen holder which can hold standard pens just fine but is too small to hold most fountain pens.For a notebook that caters specifically to fountain pen users that’s a strange oversight.

The notebook has 100 gsm very smooth acid free fountain pen friendly paper. There are 96 sheets (192 pages) in the notebook and all of them are micro-perforated. The pages can have either 7mm lines, a 5mm grid, a 5mm dot grid, or be blank, but in the WH Smith that I was in the only option was lined. The lines are printed in a neutral grey that isn’t too obtrusive but is also clearly visible.

Close up of the micro-perforated paper and the grey lines on a page.
Close up of the micro-perforated paper and the grey lines.

This is an expensive notebook (around £16 per notebook), and so I wouldn’t bother using gel ink pens, rollerballs, ballpoints or pencils in it (if you want to see a test page of that, you can find it here). There are cheaper alternatives for that. The Dingbats Wildlife notebook is built for fountain pens, and it handles them very well. The paper isn’t as glossy as Rhodia paper, but it’s still silky smooth and ink takes several seconds to dry on the page. I don’t have a lot of pens inked up at the moment, and I spread the ink tests on multiple notebooks, but I can assure you that there is no feathering or bleed through with this paper, and there’ very little show through. It’s a fountain pen friendly notebook, as advertised. Here’s a small sample written with a TWSBI Eco fine nib and Diamine Inkvent Solstice, which is a very saturated ink.

Page with alphabet handwritten in black ink once in uppercase and once in lowecase with an ink smudge on the top left.
I spilled some ink at the top of the page, and that made a mess but also assured me that there really is no bleed through with fountain pen ink.

If you are looking for a fountain pen friendly, eco friendly, fun notebook, or if you want a notebook full of perforated pages, then I highly recommend the Dingbats Wildlife notebook. It’s not a cheap notebook, so if pencils are your thing, maybe look into a cheaper alternative with toothier paper.