Posts filed under Fountain Pens

Happy Pen/Ink Pairings

(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)

While trying to figure out what I wanted to write about this week, I was struck by a few pen/ink pairings that were bringing me a little more happiness than I expected, and for very different reasons, so I thought I’d share why I’m enjoying them so much.

Kaweco Perkeo (Indian Summer) and Ferris Wheel Press Goose Poupon Despite being a long time Kaweco Sport fan, it wasn’t until 3 years ago that I first used the Kaweco Perkeo for this showdown article. I really liked the pen, but that particular color wasn’t my jam, so back it went to the Bossman for a giveaway. I eventually bought myself the Infrared one and more recently, this Indian Summer colorway. I’m not going to go into the merits of the Perkeo (you can read the review for why I like it), but this pen is “sparking joy” because I am loving the combo of this pen with Ferris Wheel Press Goose Poupon.

*Kaweco Perkeo Indian Summer (Medium nib) with Ferris Wheel Press Goose Poupon.*

For starters, I used to think that this color was gross, and years later I’m finding myself drawn to “weirder” colors like this yellow-green, which is kind of reminiscent of poopy diapers. It just reminds me that tastes can and do change, which is one way that I find myself “maturing” in this rabbit hole. This pen, at $20 (or less), is a reminder that pens don’t have to be expensive to be enjoyable. Also, this ink not only is a great, well-behaved match, but is also named Goose Poupon - a play on the Dijon-style mustard Grey Poupon - and the kid in me keeps giggling and calling it “Goose Poopoo”.

It is a nice shader, whether I’m printing or writing in cursive. The only time I had any issues was when the ink didn’t flow from the cartridge and I had to tap it a few times to get the ink to “unstick” itself from the walls (that happens with some inks if syringe-filling a cartridge). This combo is such a divergence from my usual pens/inks that it’s a welcome change to my lineup and a reminder to occasionally think (or ink) outside the box!

Kaweco Special (Red) and Diamine Noel This pen has no right being one of my favorite pens. For one, it’s red. This blue-and-gold girl (Go Bears!) is not a red girl, but over the years, fountain pens and inks have changed my tune. Still, the number of blue pens and inks far outnumber the red ones, so this really shouldn’t even be a contender! Also, it has brass accents, which goes well with the red, but is subject to patina-ing, which usually drives me crazy. And yet, for unknown reasons, it doesn’t really bother me.

This Kaweco is also a much slimmer pen than I typically prefer, but it’s still comfortable in hand. I think that its slightly heavier weight (due to it being metal, instead of the Perkeo’s plastic) balances out the slimness. What shouldn’t be a surprise is that it is faceted, which means automatic brownie points.

*Yay for facets, but look at that patina! (shudder)*

I have had this pen inked up with this ink since March 16, 2024. I filled a converter with it (once) and have used it 34 times since then (including today). I don’t always use it for lots of writing (maybe the day’s todo list or a page in a penpal letter), but it has never failed to write as soon as I uncap it. The pen’s o-ring means that it seals very well and your pen does not dry, despite traveling on many airplanes and even writing at 9000 feet in Colorado.

Lastly, I’ve inked up the pen with Diamine Noel multiple times since owning this pen. While it didn’t wow me when I first swatched it in 2019 as part of Diamine’s first Inkvent (it is a red ink, after all), I absolutely loved it once I wrote with it! Noel is a nice deep red ink with subtle green sheen and average to slightly wetter flow. I have a hard time picking a different ink for this pen, and vice versa.

*The subtle greenish gold sheen is chef’s kiss!*

Platinum 3776 (Shape of Heart, Chai Latte) with Lennon Tool Bar Sesame Oil No surprise that a Platinum 3776 with a Medium nib is something that I enjoy writing with, and I love this special edition with the light brown cap with crystals in the finial (just don’t make me find the 3 punched out nib-hearts!), but I am REALLY digging the pen with the Lennon Tool Bar Sesame Oil ink. The ink is a light brown ink that has great shading, especially when printing. Copying out Meditations with this pen/ink combo is so calming because the soft brown ink, despite not being a wet ink, just flows so perfectly out of this pen. Bonus was that a friend helped me get a bottle of this ink when it was sold out everywhere. No crazy revelations here, just a combination that I’m really loving.

*Love this combo, not much more to it than that!*

TWSBI Vac 700R (Kyanite) with Robert Oster Blue Denim I was hoping that the Jacques Herbin’s Kyanite du Nepal would be a good match for the TWSBI Vac 700R, Kyanite, but alas, the colors were off enough that it would drive me crazy, so I picked a better match that I hadn’t used in several years, Robert Oster Blue Denim.

*Jacques Herbin Kyanite du Nepal is too blue for the TWSBI Kyanite which is more of a teal.*

*Cursive or print, both were equally enjoyable with this pen/ink combo.*

I’ve really been enjoying writing with this larger TWSBI (with the size 6 nib) for transcribing another Italian kids book. The Medium nib feels great and I love seeing the ink matching the nib as it flows onto the page.

*The ink/nib match really kicked it up several notches for me!*

The ink is also a subtle sheener, with a touch of red sheen in some spots (more noticeable with print than cursive). I don’t usually love high capacity pens because I have so many pens inked up at a time, but it’s kind of cool watching the ink level slowly going down (9 pages down, maybe another 20 to go). The ink flow isn’t too wet nor dry and matches the wetness of the size 6 nib. Another happy combo.

*Look at that subtle red sheen! Have I mentioned how much I love subtle sheen like that?*

I’m sure I could come up with more happy combinations, but these really just struck me as some current favorites, and not just because of ink/pen matchy match, though let’s be real, a good color match also makes me happy. With everything happening in the world around us, we could all use anything that brings a little bit of joy and sunshine in our lives. After all, isn’t that why we use fountain pens? ☺️

PS - Bonus happiness is me finally getting around to starting a book journal for the books I read last year.

(Disclaimer: All products, pens, inks, papers, stamps, and washi tape are my own.)

Posted on February 7, 2025 by Kimberly Lau and filed under Fountain Pens.

Laban 325 Fountain Pen Review

Founded in Taiwan in 1981, Laban has been present in the fountain pen world for a while, but only came on my radar in the last several years. In using the Laban 325, I can only wonder what took me so long?

I’ve had this pen inked up on and off for the past three months, and every time I pick it up and write with it, the same group of words come to mind. Solid. Nice. Pretty. Quality. Fun. What more can I ask for from a pen? Not much. The Pen Addict Review Crew have been reviewing Laban fountain pens since 2019, to generally high praise, and I’m only going to add to the chorus today.

Let’s start with what you see: the barrel. The 325 is on the larger size of the scale, especially given the cap overhang. The design works together as a whole, but the initial visual is that this is a big pen. When in user mode, aka uncapped, the 325 hits the perfect user length at just over five inches. The diameter befits its size, with a tapered section providing a nice grip area.

Aesthetically, the 325 features three distinct visual areas. With this Sun model, both ends use an Ivory marbled acrylic, with the heart of the barrel showing off a beautiful Orange cracked acrylic. Many of the 325’s are designed similarly, with different color acrylics taking prominence on the barrel.

Laban 325 Fountain Pen Safari — *LAMY Safari for scale.*

Gold trim wins the day on the 325, with the clip, finial, barrel and cap bands, and matching gold plating on the steel nib. The nib itself is Laban-branded Jowo #6, and the Medium tip was perfect out of the box. This is an international cartridge/converter filler, and ships with Laban marked on the converter.

Writing comfort is perfect for me. To say that I don’t notice the pen when writing is a high compliment. When I’m putting ink on the page, I want nothing more to get into the flow. I don’t want to think about the pen, nib, ink, or paper. The 325 allows for that.

Should you consider trying out a Laban fountain pen, specifically the 325? At $128, it doesn’t have a lot of price competition. The entire $75 to $150 range is honestly a bit confusing. Benu, Narwhal, and Opus 88 do well here, fancy Kaweco’s live here, maybe some solid maker pens. The 325 is one of the lower priced Laban pens, and has some of the Leonardo Momento Zero feel to it for around $40 less. So yes, I think they are compelling.

*L’Ecritoire ink, from Paris. Courtesy of a pen friend.*

Laban makes several different styles of pens in their lineup, and given the feel and functionality of the 325, I’m interested in moving on up the price bracket to see if the value proposition continues to hold. Seems like a good plan for 2025.

(This pen was provided by Luxury Brands USA at no charge for purposes of this review.)

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Posted on January 27, 2025 by Brad Dowdy and filed under Laban, Fountain Pens, Pen Reviews.

Lessons Learned from Valentina

As you may recall, I have been working on my Italian by copying/transcribing books. I started copying a pocket Italian Grammar book, which sounds exactly as fun as you think. Fortunately, I found the Italian children’s books that I bought years ago and decided I would read/copy one of them. After all, I was also copying The Little Prince (“TLP”, which is also a children’s book,) so why not an Italian one?

The book I picked is called “Un amico Internet per Valentina” (or “an Internet friend for Valentina) by Angelo Petrosino. Valentina is a 10 year old Italian girl who goes to elementary school, where she ends up getting a penpal from England and also an Internet penpal (yes, her father is nervous about this but it’s a nice kids book, not my usual murder mystery, lol).

*This is the second book in the series (I’m waiting for the first book to arrive.)*

With illustrations, large fonts, and even large chapter titles, the book was under 200 pages. So I picked an A5 Nebula Casual Note spiral notebook with 120 pages of their 90 gsm white paper. I was going to take a gamble and hope that would fit, but no big deal if it didn’t. (Spoiler: it fits, phew!)

*This is the Nebula Casual Note. I like the minimalist starry decoration in the upper right corner.*

I hadn’t used the Nebula paper in a few years so it was a nice change of pace from the usual Rhodia, Leuchtturm or Tomoe River. It has a bit of texture, almost like Midori Cotton. I used saturated inks, shimmer inks, and shading inks and had no problems with feathering or bleedthrough. Overall, I enjoyed using this paper, but I quickly discovered that I did not like side-bound spiral notebooks. As a right hander, I had no problems when writing on the right side of the page, but flip to the other side and omg, my hand would dig into the coils as soon as I got to the right half of the page.

*Written with Rohrer & Klingner Solferino, which has a slight golden sheen which you can see here.*

*I wonder if it would be better or worse if it was a spiral (single) versus the double coil.*

Unlike TLP, this is a physical book, which required me to use a book stand because (1) I don’t have room on my desk to lay out a book AND write in my notebook, and (2) so it’s easier to read when it’s propped up. Thankfully, I had bought a bookstand for this project - you can find it at The Gentleman Stationer. I love that it is foldable and has a low profile so it can sit flat on my desk without taking up a lot of room. You can also adjust it to a couple different angles, and use it with books/notepads/etc of varying thicknesses.

*This metal book stand lays pretty flat when collapsed.*

*You can see the 3 notches on the bottom of the stand which holds your book at different angles.*

While I still prefer transcribing an eBook versus a paper book because I can change the font size and I don’t have to worry about schlepping a book around, I enjoyed the tactile sensation of flipping a paper book and eyeballing how much of the book or chapter is left (without relying on my Kindle app’s stats). It’s just a nice change of pace for me, since I do all my reading on the Kindle app.

With TLP, I (1) wrote almost all of it in cursive, (2) used a different pen/ink combination per page, and (3) only wrote on one side of the page because I was using a 52 gsm Tomoe River notebook. With Valentina, I changed it all up!

For starters, I wanted to do something a little different than the cursive writing I used in TLP, but I couldn’t decide on cursive versus print. And we know that the answer is always “both” whenever there’s a choice to be made! So I chose a style that is a slightly different style of my usual cursive as well as simple print, which I don’t usually use.

*I asked IG folks which one they preferred and most of them said cursive.*

Since I wasn’t planning on making IG posts for every page like I did with TLP, I decided to use that style for a whole chapter, regardless of how many pages it took. It was nice to get a few pages of practice, which really helped with improving my consistency, especially for print, which I don’t do nearly as much as cursive.

*I wrote ~2-3 pages per chapter before switching styles.*

This last one, it’s a doozy, at least for me. Ready for this? I wrote with one pen in this notebook until the pen was empty. I didn’t use the pen for any other purpose. Not only that, I decided to pick higher capacity pens too! No Kaweco mini-converters here! For someone who routinely has 48 inked pens in order to switch it up multiple times a day, doing this was pretty extreme! I know a lot of folks regularly write with one pen until it’s empty but not me! I left these pens at home so they wouldn’t accidentally get used while at pen meetups or in my regular day-to-day writing. I was also kind of curious how many pages it would take to empty out a pen, so it was a fun experiment!

*I used the following pens to copy the book: Nahvalur Original Plus, Pilot Custom 823, TWSBI Eco-T, Pelikan M205 and Leonardo Momento Magico (which isn’t empty yet.)*

*I didn’t think to make this log until the third pen, which is why the first two entries are also in purple.*

I had no idea how many pages it would take to write a pen dry from start to finish, but it took as few as 13 pages with the Pelikan to 34 pages with the TWSBI Eco-T. In all cases, I filled the pens to as much as they can be filled, including expelling air from the vac fillers to top them up. Thank goodness Fountain Pen Companion made it easy for me to track all of this!

Here are some stats:

199 physical pages (includes pictures, etc) -> 97 handwritten A5 pages
5 high capacity pens used (the 5th pen still has ~10 pages of ink left)
- Nahvalur Original Plus, Medium nib - 22 pages
- Pilot Custom 823, Fine Medium - 26 pages - I would have expected to get more pages due to the FM nib.
- TWSBI Eco -T, Medium - 34 pages - Wow, I am shocked I got more out of this pen than the 823!
- Pelikan M205, Medium - 13 pages - I know it’s a smaller pen than the others but I didn’t expect it to have that much less writing capacity.
- Leonardo Momento Magico, Medium nib - 11 pages so far. I’m pretty sure there’s another 10-20 pages worth of ink left.
4-5 months spent on this project, writing 4-5 times per week, 1-3 pages per session.

I’m no language expert or student of linguistics but I feel like transcribing a book in a foreign language has really improved my Italian. For starters, you can only really read and remember a few words at a time before writing them down. This makes it much easier to figure out what I was reading. Whereas, if I tried to read the book (and not copy it), I would naturally try to read it at the same pace as English and end up not understanding what I’m reading because my brain can’t process it at that faster rate. I’m also “speaking” the words in my head as I write them, which also engages a different part of the brain than just reading the words or writing them on paper.

When encountering unfamiliar words, I had heard and read that it is better to guess at the meaning than it is to bust out a dictionary to understand every single word. Every now and then, an unknown word or two would be so critical that I couldn’t figure out the gist without looking it up. Not gonna lie, Google Translate’s camera feature came in clutch a few times. But for the most part, I was able to follow along and understand the story even though I didn’t know every word. In the end, I would say I understood 75% or more of the text, which I think is pretty good, even if it is a book geared towards 5th graders!

*Screenshot of the book (left side) and Google Translate (with Google Lens) in action on the right.*

I still have another 20 or so pages left in this notebook AND the Leonardo Momento Magico is still inked up, so I’m excited to pick up another Valentina book and keep on reading, writing, and learning!