the longest day, the shortest night

Here, anyway.

My solstice present from A involved getting a Galen Leather A5 Zipfolio hand-carried over from Turkey.

You may recall that just under a year ago I asked for advice on dying leather and a bunch of you said, very reasonably, "well I wouldn't start from here." So I spent a bit of time researching dyes, and I mulled and I dithered, and then a couple of months ago -- before I got around to doing anything with the Forest Green zipfolio I bought a couplefew years ago now -- they released a new variant. called Ocean Blue.

... I am mildly sheepish to now own two of these things, but hey, he was able to order from the Turkish site and the exchange rate with the lira wasn't terrible. Ergo:

[two notebook covers on a wooden floor: one open, in a bright ocean blue, with a grey linen-covered notebook resting on it and a fountain pen resting on top of that; one closed, in a faded forest green, with a mostly-blue decorative postcard resting on it]

When I confessed to having Made This Request I got asked to provide colour comparison photos. I am Not Particularly Good at photography, and I especially do not understand the mysterious ways of colour fidelity, so I was a bit flapsome about how best to achieve this until I remembered that (1) the person asking owns A Lot of embroidery floss, and (2) I recently (by which I mean "in August") came into possession of my own unreasonable quantity of embroidery floss.

Ergo:

[two leather notebook covers, both closed, one a saturated ocean blue and one a faded forest green. both have a number of cards of embroidery floss distributed across them, with the colour codes visible.]

I am very pleased! And at some point I might even actually start setting up next year's notebook...