Tag: schon design

July’s Currently Inked Fountain Pens

This month features a few new inks, and a lot of old favourites that I haven’t used for a while.

Big Idea Design’s Fountain EDC is far from perfect, and yet I’ve inked it up again. It’s the ultem and the ease of capping an uncapping it – it makes it a great EDC fountain pen even though it still has infuriating flow issues. This, however, is the last time I’m inking it for a while (after filling it three times in a row) as I have lost patience with getting it to work properly when I’m journalling. The Schneider Cognac is a new ink for me, a cartridge packet that I bought in London for a pretty steep discount. The colour is a nice orange brown with a good amount of shading and good flow.

Kanilea Pen Co Haleakala Silhouette is gorgeous and overpriced pen that I haven’t used in a while. Sailor studio 123 ink was also in my previous rotation, but I now have two bottles of this most gorgeous of grey inks, so I feel like I should give it more use.

Omas Bibliotheque Nationale is a pen that I bought about a decade ago at Mora Stylos in Paris. The nib is extraordinary, and I decided that I wanted to use it again. It lays a thick, juicy line of ink that works well with Diamine Earl Grey. Diamine Earl Grey is not only a great grey ink at a fraction of Sailor Studio 123’s cost, it also doesn’t bleed through to the other side of the paper in even the Omas’s generous ink. So I get a dark grey with plenty of shading and character, but I can also journal on the other side of the page.

Rotring Levenger 600 is a wonderful pen that Rotring needs to make more of, and Sailor Jentle Sky High is a discontinued ink that Sailor likely makes under a different name and a higher price now. I like the colour, even though it’s a blue and blue inks tend to be boring, and the Rotring works well in use for my office notes.

Writing sample part 1

Sailor Pro Gear Slim Graphite Lighthouse is one of the last Sailor pens that I bought, and it’s one of my favourites. The H-EF nib is extremely fine, and not for everyone. Sailor Jentle Epinard is a great discontinued dark green ink from Sailor, and they likely make something similar under a different name and higher price (or you can find a parallel Diamine ink for much cheaper). The Sailor Jentle ink’s discontinuation was when I bought this and the other Jentle inks in use here, and I kind of regret my shopping rush. There’s no point in buying discontinued ink, as you’ll likely easily find something else similar to that (something that doesn’t use the Jentle ink’s terrible flat bottle design), or something better.

Schon Design faceted pocket six patina is a great pocket pen, and the Schneider Bermuda Blue is a great teal ink. The shading on this ink is excellent, and if I get a chance to buy another box of cartridges when this one is empty, I will.

The TWSBI ECO T isn’t as interesting to me as the ink inside it. I’ve been wanting to try out Diamine Ancient Copper for a long time, and when I was in Oxford I managed to get a bottle. It does not disappoint – great flow, great shading, great rich burnt sienna colour.

Writing sample part 2

I haven’t used the Platinum 3776 in a while, and I almost forgot what a great workhorse of a pen it is. Sailor Jentle Ultramarine, a very bluish purple, long discontinued, is kind of on the boring side.

Here are the pens from top to bottom:

Big Idea Design Fountain EDC

Kanilea Pen Co Haleakala Silhouette

Omas Bibliotheque Nationale LE from 1999

Rotring Levenger 600

Sailor Pro Gear Slim Graphite Lighthouse

Schon Design Faceted Pocket Six Patina

TWSBI ECO T Saffron

Platinum 3776 Demonstrator

The pens

What have you got inked up this month?

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?