Starting the year off right with improved ink storage
Careful thought and a curbside pickup at IKEA yielded a new and much-improved ink storage system. I’m happiest when my ink collection is arranged so I can directly locate the exact bottle I’m interested in. I’m seeking to cut down time spent hunting through bottles or ink boxes.
My ink collection is already tagged by color family. While I have sub-sets, the four major families are: grey / black, blue /teal, earth tones (oranges, browns, etc.), and accent colors (everything else). The new system is built on these four families.
Inside, I used felt strips to form barriers between colors. Green inks sit together inside a box. Oranges play together on one side of the barrier, brown inks on the other side.
I do still need to search within each color’s sub-compartment. But my shelves are now more peacefully organized. And I need only search through a handful of bottles instead of the entire ink bottle collection. Imperfect improvements are steps in the right direction. Or, as I say to my students: we’ve reached a better version of the problem.
Orderly, by color
This week’s Inked Tines update includes my most recent currently inked writing tools.
Toolset
Pens. There is consternation in online stationery spaces about Pilot’s converters. I like a piston converter. It’s easy to use so long as it forms a seal around the section’s access. The agitators in my con-40 brought out the best of Gris Orage. No surprise that the Pilot 912 was a clear standout for this week.
Pilot Custom Heritage 912 — 1/3. Personal task management in my new Hobonichi Weeks. The built-in agitators work great for keeping shimmer inks like Gris Orage at peak shimmer.
Sailor Pro Gear (Z/A) — Full. Wrote one thank you letter with this pen. It’s a lovely combination of colors and line-size. Will be a wonderful journaling combo in the coming week.
Kaweco Skyline Sport — 1/2. My most-used pen this week. Pocket notes and scratch notes while on the phone. Like the combo: Summer Storm is dark enough to be legible and purple enough to be fun.
TWSBI 580 ALR — 4/5. A very wet combination. The EF side of Bacas’ hybrid predator grind makes the pen great for self-editing my own writing.
TWSBI Vac700R — 1/5 (I only filled this pen to 1/5). A surprisingly dry combination. Cat at Dusk is a pale, light ink. It shades best (and is most readable) while writing slowly. Will make a fun combo for slow-writing activities like recording commonplace notes and journaling.
Visconti Homo Sapiens — ??. I really like my Homo Sapiens with a round nib. The wet feed paired quite well with the drier Kyo-iro. Used this pair for a few phone calls and for the only meeting I had all week.
Sailor Pro Gear (SF); Nakaya Neostandard & Faber-Castell Ondoro — Full. No comment this week as I didn’t reach for these combos often.
Notebooks. Work bujo. No new work-related writing. I have time set aside for lesson plan revisions starting this weekend. After two weeks to breathe and recover, I’m excited to get back into my teaching.
Musubi Journal. One page. My friends have a virtual writing café scheduled for tonight. We listen to music in a shared JQBX playlist, drink tea, and work on our respective projects. Stationery-loving friends are wonderful.
I spent a lot of time this past week connecting with family – virtually, of course. Family is important. The Musubi is patient. There will be plenty of writing in the coming weeks.
Electronic drafting. In place of journaling, I read quite a lot; and finished Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. What writing I did get to happened in Bear (my primary drafting software). A few pages of scratch notes and outlining happened in my desk Rhodia pad. I have been hacking away at a manuscript introducing queer legal studies in the field of education for a week now. It should be ready for my editor by Monday night.
Looking back on my reading from last year, I finished 17 books. Six were fiction. Eleven were non-fiction. Standouts were Dunbar-Ortiz’s pointed An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist. And a lot of Jim Harrison poems. I habitually re-read Harrison poems.
Written dry. No pens ran dry this week. I’m lulling them into a false sense of security.
Newly inked. I inked one new pen on Friday afternoon. My ongoing search for an orange-brown ink that is orange where lightest and brown where darkest continues with my most recent ink sample: Sailor 973 (swatch below).
The Collection
Incoming / new orders. Pen Chalet offered a great Black Friday deal on the Monteverde Sequoia. I went in with a good friend and we ended up paying $30 each. I selected a new brown model.
Surprisingly smooth Monteverde F
It’s sizable, comfortable, and came with a smooth F, right out of the box. It’s unfortunately rare that I don’t have to tune a new pen. Kudos to Monteverde.
Outgoing / trades or sales. The Looms went up for sale Friday evening.
Currently listening
I had Spotify’s Garden Indie playlist on repeat for most of the week. I dig a warm, mellow indie playlist.
