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Month: August 2024

Ink Battle: Kyo No Oto and Colorverse

Posted in Ink

This ink battle is between Kyo No Oto Yamabukiiro and Colorverse Adobe. Both inks are in a pen fitted with a #6 Jowo M nib. The paper is Muji loose leaf plain.

Today’s ink battle is another bout of bottle versus sample. It determined if I keep my sample of Yamabukiiro in use, or relegate it to the “for dupes” baskets. If I keep it and go through the whole sample, then I’ll consider getting a bottle.

Between myself and Jim buying inks, we own far too many. This means I have some inks that are incredibly similar in color. And, because of that, I need to figure out which inks to keep and which to dispose of. Sometimes, I have samples of two or more similar inks that I'm trying to decide which to buy, or if I should buy one ink when I already own a bottle of a similar one.

Enter ink battles. I put the similar inks into pens with the same nibs (two Jowo #6 M, two TWSBI F, etc.), then test them out to see which I like better. Or, I may find out that, when used with the same nib, they’re sufficiently different to keep.

You can assume I have no problems with any ink that appears in an ink battle. I may find, when using the inks side-by-side, that there are performance differences, but the point of the battle is to choose a favorite ink, a "winner". These choices are often subjective, and you may disagree with me.

An ink battle — unlike ink dupes — is between inks I like. I enjoy using them enough to have them in my "for use" ink collection — as opposed to my repository of inks for testing dupes. If an ink performed poorly or caused problems, I wouldn’t keep it. And, if that were the case, an ink battle would be unnecessary.

Reminder: You can find all of the ink battle posts on the tag page.

Pen Show Nibs Overviews

Posted in Fountain Pens

As promised, I give you a post dedicated to the five nibs I bought at the DC Pen Show this year. This post is part showing off — sorry, but at least I admit it — because the nibs are awesome, and part review.

This is absolutely not a rating or ranking post. I’m sharing these alphabetically by nibmeister then by nib grind name. You can click on any picture to view it larger.

Displaying My Pens

Posted in Fountain Pens

As I’ve said before, I have a lot of pens, too many, really. I can’t use them as much as I’d like, which means they spend far too much time put away in pen cases. Most of my pens are in use for only a week at a time. That means none of them, and especially my special pens, don’t get the appreciation they deserve.

When my pen collection first expanded to include pens that couldn’t go in a standard pen case — mainly urushi pens — I kept them in pen sleeves. After a while, I decided to get a pen box. It didn’t take me long to move the pen box to one of the display cases I’d purchased years before for my Pop Figure collection.

2024 DC Pen Show

Posted in Pen Shows

I’m alive! Mostly. I’m still sick as I write this. Someone dropped a free case of COVID in my DC Pen Show shopping bag. And, since I don’t know who did it, I can’t even return it. *sigh* So, please forgive how long it took me to get this written and posted.

That said, I had a blast at the DC Pen Show this year. As I mentioned in my pen show prep post, I had an initial shopping list to get me started:

  • 2 broad Jowo nibs
    For my nibmeister appointments
  • 3-pen case
  • Diamine Sailor’s Warning
    I needed this after the Wistful Watermelon/Sailor’s Warning battle. And I was hoping to get a bottle with the Sailor’s Warning label (rather than the new Red Sky label).