Cult Pens is evil, TK Maxx ditto

All items below were purchased by me from my own money and no inducements were offered to create this post and I plan to do more of these to shame myself for over-spend.

Cult Pens have at the time of this post (30th of July 2018) a 3 for 2 on entry-level pens.

I have a weakness for Pilot Preppy's and the Monami Oilka looked interesting.  I have a dislike relationship with the Zebra and Pilot V-Pens - I have yet to find a paper that they don't bleed through and feather and basically I don't regard them as good everyday pens.  If you want a pen to sign things regularly where you want to be assured which is the original document they're great, they also start well every time, I still find them blooby bleedy monsters and when I'm done with the few I have I'm getting rid of them.  I've seen a lot of people recommend them as starter pens, I wouldn't.  I plan to do a (more) ranty post about them some day with samples.

Anyhow, I put a few fine and extra fine Preppys and Oilkas into my shopping cart and then I put a couple of the Anniversary Diamine wedges  By that point I was at almost £35 and at £50 Cult Pens offer Free Shipping.  So 3 Diamine Samples: Regency Blue, Espresso and Purple Dreams, one Callifolio: Inca Sol; a platinum adapter for ordinary refils and a clutch pencil sharpener and I was just over the £50. Now I just need three more of the Diamine Wedges and I have the 8 to make the circle.

Samples are below and images of the pens. I haven't added the ink to the Preppy's as they're backups for the ones I have and possibly give to people pens for them to try reasonable cheap fountain pens  The Monami Oilakas are quite nice, the extra-fine is a little scratchy but they're quite solid and they take standard international cartridges..

 

I also visited TK Maxx during the week not expecting much, occasionally they have some nice bits and pieces and I have picked up some interesting things.  I was actually looking for a water bottle as I've found the Twining's Cold Infuse and with the current weather the idea of drinking hot tea is just not really appealing (except for some medicinal Lemon and Ginger, which I have found quite good for my sinuses) and Tesco have them on special offer.  I did get  the water bottle - a borosilicate one but seeing as it's going to live on my desk the weight isn't going to be an issue.  

Before I got to the kitchenware section the stationery section sang it's siren song.  I came across a Loooq Koyoto Notebook cover and some notebooks. There's plenty of space in the cover for a pen and it will take a standard A5 notebook.as a replacement. The cover pocket has a tab to help pull smaller things out, there's one large interior pocket as well.  It sits nicely open and it would be a nice single notebook cover.

The notebooks are Punch Studio with Write, Compose and  Notes written on them. 

For me TK Maxx is useful for finding  unusual notebooks that are hard to find and then I can, for a relatively inexpensive price, try different paper producers.  It's also a terrible drain on my wallet.

July Appelboom Inxperiment

 The July inxperiment all swatched up, I've been staring at the
postcard and the colours aren't really inspiring me to work with them and it.

Ah well.  I do like the brown., the Petit Prince is interesting, the Iroshizuku is incredibly vibrant.  The Lamy green is very green and the yellow is indeed very yellow.

I'm not sure I'd buy a full bottle of any of it but they're interesting colours.

The swatches are on a light cream notebook I got from Tesco that's perfect for swatches so the colours may be a little off.
I'm getting a bit better with the writing with the glass pen.

All items purchased by me and no inducement was offered by anyone to write this post.

Wyvernfriend's Desk

I now have anew lap desks (more commonly known as a writing slope) and a new desk.  I plan better photographs of this stuff.  I purchased them at the Victor Mee Auctions of the contents of Cafe en Siene, most of the contents were Art Nouveau and I'm a sucker for that era.  I plan to clean them a bit and possibly do minor restorations but otherwise they're actually quite good. There were a few others that I kinda wanted more than the writing slope I got but they would have taken much more work to restore.  The paper on the writing slope is the same piece of paper on the desk writing space.

June inxperiment

I've been staring at these colours for a while wondering what to do with the postcard... I'm thinking of picking up some masking fluid and going a bit crazy with washes.  If I do I'll update this post.

I found one of my glass pens recently and made use of it.