New Sailor Kobe Inks

There's nothing more exciting than when a new batch of Sailor inks are released. I always say you can never go wrong with a Sailor ink - they're reliable, well-behaved, beautiful shades - but of course I'm shamelessly biased towards the line. They were some of my first inks - I did a lot of marking with Grenade and Epinard when I was a teacher - and they are still some of my favourites, so when we get new Sailor colours in the shop, I can't wait to see what they look like first hand.

 

 

The new inks are: No. 18 Sannomiya Panse (Purple) No. 50 Kyomachi Legend Blue No. 34 Sorakuen Tea Green No. 19 Minatogawa Lime Green No. 59 Hirano Gion Romance Grey No. 24 Nakayamate Black Here are a few close ups of the inks. It's on a cream coloured MD notebook, and while I know it's always hard to get ink colours accurate through screens, I know cream paper makes it even more difficult. I'm hoping to just give you an idea, but your best bet to truly get to know an ink is through an ink sample. No. 18 Sannomiya Panse:

 

No. 50 Kyomachi Legend Blue No. 24 Sorakuen Tea Green No. 19 Minatogawa Lime Green: No. 59 Hirano Gion Romance Grey No. 18 Nakayamate Black:

 

I was just thinking to myself I could use a good grey and what should arrive on my doorstep but the new No.59 Hirano Gion Romance Grey. My ink supply seems to be expanding rapidly, but I can say I don't have too many greys, so this is just what I needed. The new inks are currently in our TWSBI testers, so if you're in the neighbourhood you can come by to test them out in the shop for a doodle.

 

 

I currently have three Lamy Safaris (Vista, All-Black, Neon Lime) with three trusty, stand-by Sailor inks (Sky High, Epinard, 4B). The Safaris were terrific for all the craziness with packing and the move and setting up, but these new Kobe inks arrived just in time for me to start cleaning out some pens and taking more time for writing again.

I've put the Hirano Gion Romance Grey into my Franklin Christoph Model 20 already, a great match, and I'm hoping to test out a few more of these colours soon. Over the last couple of months I've been sticking with my tried and true in both pens and inks, but it's about time to start branching out again.  

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In other news, our shipping operation just got set up with this new paper wrap - it's paper that goes through a sort of punch that turns the paper into a 3D honeycomb pattern, with a tissue interleaf - as a replacement for plastic bubble wrap. Over the next little while you might see it in your online orders, although of course we'll still be re-using any bubble wrap or other packaging materials from our vendors or distributors, as always.

As a small business, we've always got a lot of balls in the air - the cyclical stuff, like HR or taxes or seasonal order, along with the seemingly endless one offs, like security issues or figuring out garbage facilities or roof leaks or hiring new staff or moving a phone line or buying a new camera or website problems or identifying fraudulent orders or trying to move a whole bunch of plants.

This one, though, the new paper packaging, has been a great project to get off the back burner: it's been a long time coming - as we've been anticipating the new move, we decided to wait until the new shop to get set up with this new system - but it's finally set up in our new warehouse, and I'm thrilled we've finally gotten our act together for this step. Giant garbage patches in our oceans, straws up giant tortoise's noses, plastic fibers in tap water - it was about time to put our money where our mouth is and start (slowly) taking steps to see what plastic products we can reasonably start replacing with paper. It's hard because we don't want to adopt an onerous or expensive replacement that we can’t sustain, but at the same time, as the people who can make a choice in our workplace, we need to be thoughtful about it.

We've still got a long way to go, but we go through a lot of bubble wrap everyday, and it feels great to commit to reducing plastic in a tangible way.

Currently reading: Elizabeth Strout's Abide with Me
Currently eating: blueberry cheesecake
Current analogue project: organizing my supply of greeting and note cards and postcards, and getting some mail out
Currently enjoying: walking around the new neighbourhood with a napping baby in the stroller
Latest heard from the mouths of babes:
Caleb, with camera: Papa, say cheese! Say cheese! Cheese! Say Cheese, Papa!
Jon: (unenthusiastically) Cheese.
Caleb: No! More cheesy!