What's in My Pen Roll - Winter Is Ending

Every once in a while I share what's in my pen roll with you - I've been meaning to do it more often than I have, but as the warm weather rolls I'm ready for a fresh season, and these are the inks I'm taking with me. (I am aware that it's still February, and that we still have March and April and potentially May to get through before we can officially declare snow to be over, but it's warm now and I'm taking it while I can.)

Pelikan Edelstein Jade - TWSBI ECO Lime Green 1.1

Lamy Pacific Blue Cartridge - Lamy Pacific Blue Al-Star Broad

Pilot Iroshizuku Shin-Kai - Pilot Custom 92 Medium

Noodler's Blue Upon the Plains of Abraham - Platinum 3776 Brown Tortoiseshell Medium

Sailor Rikyu-Cha - Pelikan M400 Tortoiseshell Fine

Noodler's Zhivago - Lamy 2000 Fine

J. Herbin Lie de the - Sailor 1911 S Medium

These are some of my favourite combinations to date. I'm a bit prone to using the same inks over and over in a relatively small grouping of my favourite pens, but it's because it's sort of nice when a pen and ink settle together nicely.

We got Pelikan inks in just in time - they've announced a Smoky Quartz colour of the year coming out soon, and I'm barely holding myself together. Pelikan Edelstein Jade is a beautiful colour, although a bit on the dry side and you all know I like my inks as wet as possible. Lamy Pacific Blue - admittedly I'd never tried Lamy Turquoise before, but it's a beautiful peacock turquoise blue, and it matches the pen perfectly. Noodler's Blue Upon the Plains of Abraham In my favourite Platinum 3776 Tortoiseshell. The tortoiseshell version comes with gold trim and gold nib, but a customer wanted a broad nib, which was what was in my tortoiseshell, in his silver nib 3776, so we swapped. At first I thought I wouldn't mind that my gold trim pen had a silver nib, and for a while it turns out it did, but the nib writes so beautifully that I couldn't bear to change it to a different nib, gold or otherwise. But it still kills me every time I look at it. I'd been working hard on keeping fewer inked pens - I mean, the point is the write with them, not to just have them inked up. I did discover, though, that I sort of just like having more pens inked up. It's not so much fun when you only have three or four pens, even though I guess (really), you only need one. I've also been trying to catch up with InCoWriMo letters, which has been good reason to get the pens going. It's been so wonderful to get letters and postcards through our mailbox, including people who discovered us recently or people just sending a thank you note for the pen pal match up, but I've been trying to work on my back log of correspondence. Time at the cottage was supposed to remedy some of it, but there's been a lot of work to do to fix the place up a bit, even buried under the snow. So that's it! These are some of my usual earthy favourites, along with some brighter ones and a few blues. While there's still a ton of snow up at the cottage, it's getting warmer and warmer here in Toronto, and it's been nice to see folks stretching their legs and coming in through our doors. In particular, this weekend, we're getting ready for our first pop-up shop with Paper Plus Cloth, where basically I'm going to be stocking up enough washi tape to last for the next decade. It's been a busy week, with a few new things coming in through our doors, and more expected soon. One in particular I can't wait to share with you all - a few hints: leather + made in Japan. I'm hoping to share a few more hints soon, but I'm sort of one of those floodgates opening kind of people.