Holiday Season Updates

The holidays are coming! I feel a bit jittery and excited just thinking about eggnog and hot chocolate and staying inside with some tea and fountain pens as I look out at the snow falling along with the temperatures. We are hustling here already, with boxes and boxes coming through the doors, and stacked up everywhere as we unpack, count and organize. We've been making ink samples like crazy at night, and have already gone through an entire season of House (answer: it's a blood clot, and the patient needs some epi and maybe a dose of Heparin). With the holidays we've got a few bits and pieces of news for you. Winter Ink Shipping We are very close to starting to send packages to the post office, depending on your location. It's something we request on our end, to make sure your ink gets to you as safely as possible. We will also start siphoning off some ink into a sample vial (which we will include with your order) so in case of freezing, there is room for expansion. We understand that in your situation, your home may be still be receiving door to door delivery and someone will be home, but your package may not come straight from a warm & toasty post office directly to your home - it may have to pit stop on an unheated truck outside all day or be left in a pick-up box for longer than anticipated. Please see our winter shipping post for more details. Brick & Mortar Extended Hours Our bricks & mortar will have extended hours, if you're local to us and want to come and visit. You can always check our shop calendar to see if we're open late on a date you're planning on coming down. If you're doing holiday shopping, earlier is better! We are already getting visits from people stocking up for the holidays, and we do our very best to make sure everything is in stock, there are inevitably always a few items that run out.

Online Ordering Shipping timelines *Please remember that there is always, always a small chance that your order will experience unexpected delays, even if you place your order with plenty of time to spare - mistakes happen, packages fall off trucks or get misrouted or get sent to the wrong province. With the increased volume during the holidays, Canada Post also increases its capacity, but earlier is better! Earlier is better. We are pumped! We are ready to go! And we hope to hit the ground running as the holidays come. But earlier is better so there's no danger of what you're looking for being out of stock, so we can process it and get it out the door as quickly as possible, and to avoid any bottlenecking at Canada Post as the holiday orders start crunching through. Based on our experience, placing your online orders with our shop by the following guidelines leaves a safe amount of time for your orders to arrive through Canada Post. Canada Post does provide service over the weekends through the holidays. Within Toronto & GTA: Friday, December 18th Within Ontario & Quebec: Wednesday, December 16th All other provinces: Friday, December 11th Any rural address, Northern provinces or territories: Friday, December 4th If you are in an emergency situation and you need something faster, you can e-mail us for a quote on Express shipping. However, because we ourselves experience a higher volume than normal, and each Express shipping quote needs to be manually calculated based on size & weight of package and destination, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to provide the quote and process your order as quickly as we normally would during the non-holiday season. We will try our best! But it is safest to order early. We don't like disappointment at Christmas anymore than you do :)

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If your package is a gift, you can leave us a note in the order comments. We do not provide gift wrapping at this time, but we can certainly hand write a short message on a gift tag, and include a packing slip with no prices. At long last! We have online gift certificates. For those particularly difficult to shop for, consider a gift certificate! That's about it from us for holiday logistics! I apologize if this was a bit of a dry read, but I hope that as we get the logistics out of the way, we can get right back into celebrating the holidays with good cheer. This is a magical time of year, and particularly for us - even though this will be Caleb's second Christmas, it kind of seems like his first where he's not just a crying blob (although sometimes still crying and sometimes still just a blob). Snow and Christmas trees and Christmas cookies and twinkle lights. And holiday sweaters. And candy canes. The most wonderful time of the year :)