New cards for my ink storage system
I store my ink bottles in four white hard-paper boxes. Each box rests on a shelf. I use Col-O-Ring cards as labels to show me which color families rest in each box.
The point is to minimize the number of bottles I need to search through in my hunt for a specific ink — when I have one in mind.
The point is also to encourage enough disorder within each box to ensure I stumble onto inks I don’t often think about. Especially welcome when I’m simply perusing for “a blue” or “some sort of green.”
That moment in Tetris when it’s all about to crumble …
I guessed Greens and Oranges would be my biggest draws when I last organized my storage boxes into four sections: Grey and Black, Blues, Green and Purple, and Browns and Oranges.
Alas, greens and purples both exploded in size in the months since — contrary to my prediction.
The green/purple box grew until it stored mountains of ink bottles. So many that I had to remove a top layer of precariously perched bottles to search through the entire box. Tetris with consequences.
Orderly … ish
This week’s reorganization reimagined the color families in each box. I paired greens with browns (earth tones) and paired purples with oranges. A high-volume color family with a low-volume color family.
I swatched one ink from each color family onto each box’s Col-O-Ring card. Washi tape helped craft neat borders between each color’s swatch. Neato.
This week’s Inked Tines update includes last week’s currently inked writing tools.
Toolset
Pens. No standout combo this week. Bleep bloop.
TWSBI 580-AL (M Selvedge) — 1/5. A well-paired ink and pen. Saw some lesson planning early in the week and then largely sat unattended in my penvelope. Subconscious neglect.
Pelikan m805 (F) — 1/5. Evolved into my pocket carry over the course of the week. Consistent. Legible. And comfortable in the hand — for short and long writing sessions. Teaching reflections, lesson plans, lecture notes, and scratch notes.
Platinum 3776 (F) — 1/4. Surprisingly consistent hard starts. Yep. In a Platinum. Unsure what the cause is. Lovely, crisp F lines while writing. Task management, meeting notes, lesson plans, and reading notes.
Pilot Custom Heritage 92 (FM) — 1/4. Heavy sheening inks a prone to hard starts; an expected part of the adventure. Blurple where sheen shows. Fun for lecture notes, accent meeting notes, lesson plans, and journaling.
Relic Pens Large (M Bu-di). 2/5. Pulled double-duty as a heading writer and as detailed pre-meeting agenda maker. Also: lesson plans and completing student presentation feedback. Consistent, fun writing.
Visconti Homo Sapiens (F CI) — ?? A wet combination that worked especially well on well-sized papers like Tomoe River and Graphilo. Judicious use with lesson plans and teaching reflections suited work that could sit and dry for a minute before shifting tasks. And journaling.
Notebooks. Work bujo. Kokuyo Century 5mm Dot Grid (A5). The week started on page 107 and ended in notes from a curriculum planning meeting on page 120. A thirteen page journey dominated by meeting notes.
Curriculum planning meetings exist in two realms, each with a separate ink color.
The top of the page is adorned with a hotlist of the aspects within a coming series of lessons (often called a curricular unit) that I have questions about or need resources to implement.
Moody purple seemed fitting for the review unit before a coming test day
Accent ink colors craft an easily located header at the top of the page. The bulleted list sets the list up for quick task and migration management a la bullet journaling: an X marks complete and a cross marks migrated to the task list.
I recorded detailed notes during curricular meetings with the Kylo Ren 3776. A straight-to-business F nib with a dark, shadowy grey ink. Just enough shading to be interesting.
A comfortable notetaking rhythm at long last.
Bringing order to the galaxy curriculum prep
Journal. Kobeha Graphilo Grid (A5). Last week proved a light with respect to journaling. A sequence of late mid-week evenings knocked out my routine evening self-reflection times. Two one-page entries. Both recapping my days.
Monday night’s entry leaned on the Pilot Custom Heritage’s bouncy FM nib. A refreshingly moderate line width compared to my penchant for EF and B lines. I chose to continue leaving a margin of three columns and three rows in this new notebook.
Negative space at the edges emphasizes the sheen
The waterfall Visconti nib carried me through Wednesday’s one-pager. Raspberry Rose is a deep magenta paired with the infamously generous Visconti feed. Dark red for happy recollections of a birthday outing with my partner.
And a sticker
But then again, any journaling is good journaling. Success is putting pen to paper. Journaling, I believe, follows the “did you get up again?” standard.
Written dry. All six pen and ink combinations continue writing on.
I saw the most ink use with last week’s daily driver: a fun and smoky blend of Platinum’s excellent nibwork and Diamine’s classic Sparkling Shadows. Expected that solid basics — black pen and grey ink — are solid all-around.
Newly inked. I swapped my newest nib — a Jowo #6 nib ground to write EF and B — into my Franklin-Christoph 03 in Ghost. Thinking ahead to next week, I aim to use this new nib and pen combination as a daily driver. I just need to choose a grey ink with prominent personality in wide line widths.
Dominant Industry’s Downpour is a grey with plenty of personality in wider lines. Plus, it lays down a wet purple and dries to a cool-toned grey. Party and business.
Fairly confident this qualifies as an ink mullet: business up front, party in the back
The collection
Incoming / new orders. Last week was chock full of new arrivals. Birthday weeks will do that.
Three cheers for gifts well-given
My partner has developed a strategy for gifting stationery to a stationery obsessive spouse: lean hard into a theme.
Sailor’s USA 50 States series has a Virginia release — the state we relocated to last summer. Virginia is a true red that will see the inside of a pen once my currently inked Visconti runs dry. The color may sit outside my typical aesthetic, but the theme is spot on. Themed inks are a draw for me.
I first noticed that Monty Winnfield began offering a new multitasker nib grind this past September. The Utility Nib offers an EF line writing right-side-up and lays down a stubby B line on reverse. My two preferred line widths.
The most metal gift of all is includes a metal collar
Outgoing / trades or sales. Progress. I feel relieved to see two great pens move on to grateful desks. My pen case stands two pens lighter than last week.
A new pen friend from my local pen group was eager to try out the Pilot Kaküno. I was only too happy to pass that neat entreé into Pilot’s lineup along.
My partner noticed me taking pictures of my Franklin-Christoph 46. They inquired about what I was doing and quickly asked for the pen. The pen shifts desks but remains under the same roof.
It’s not cheating if the pen resides in their desk, out of my pen case, and sees regular use. Double winner.
Currently reading and listening
Fiction. My adventures in Albermaine rolled on, from Chapter 3 to 7, a total of 67 pages.
As typical with my fiction intake, I read entirely in my phone’s Books app. The most recent update corrected the page number error that counted total pages at “iv” instead of the true length of books. A sincere thank you, Apple.
One line of dialogue, in particular stood out to me. Alwyn, the protagonist, quipped to an old mentor: “Anyone can be a cynic … Cynicism is not wisdom, merely an excuse to watch the world burn when you should be helping quench the flames” (p. 74).
I feel an analytic journal entry exploring why this quote resonates with me right now is in order.
Nonfiction. Walzer’s book stands, unaddressed, on my desk.
Texts on ancient world history stand at the ready for this coming week though. Necessarily bleak explorations of the Columbian Exchange and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Enjoying the annotating process will be a lifeline.
Music. I played Spotify’s lofi piano playlist all week. In my headset while lesson planning. As a quiet soundtracking underneath my teaching. While reading at home in the early weekday evenings.
The playlist is certainly worth a listen if you’re up for a no-frills calm soundscape.
