who only by moving can balance

Went to the Autumn London Pen Show! Got the Lamy 2000 EF nib ground down to a needlepoint by Thomas Ang! Did not properly notice until settling in to play with it properly that it's got this amazing slightly stubbish character to it! And he also tweaked my Platinum UEF nib to be slightly less Horrendously Dry (which had somehow not occurred to me as a solution), and... having now settled down for a bit more writing for the evening, I think I might actually really like having two UEF/needlepoint nibs to use different colours of ink in.

The idea was to reduce the number of pens in regular use by dint of retiring the Platinum, not increase it. Oh no.

Some other things! The Rudi Rother Pelikan is even prettier in person; I still do not get the appeal of Leonardos (though to be fair I think my sense of their general appeal is massively skewed by That One Very Active Person who thinks they're The Most Beautiful Pens In All The World); the Visconti Van Gogh series do not impress me any more in person than they do in photographs; next time I can justify buying another TN insert The Inked Paw are delightful and we had an excellent chat and Trying Each Other's Pens while I was in Thomas Ang's queue (and they slightly discombobulated me by asking me if I had an Instagram when I flipped through my notebook to show what I use the UEF for...)

... yeah no I am just absolutely delighted by this ridiculous pen, EXCELLENT outing + date activity, Ben's Cookies also successfully acquired, Very Happy.

Okay! So! The notebook I have bought myself a decade's supply of (just starting year two) is the Pebble Stationery Co. A5 Cosmo Hardcover, which is covered with linen. (I actually have five blue and five grey, and I'm intending to alternate them.)

I had resigned myself to needing to keep things carefully organised and even then probably have to actually open the notebooks up when I find myself wanting to refer back to something, But Then a few days ago it Occurred to me that I know that linen-covered notebooks can be stamped with debossed designs, with or without (hot, I think?) foiling. I also (think I) know that this does not (necessarily) require the design to be stamped prior to assembly of the notebook (but maybe spines are harder???).

... I quite like the idea of stamping the year onto these notebooks (again, optionally with foiling), but I am having Difficulty finding information on (1) what kind of set-up I'd need given that I have this one extremely specific use-case, and (2) the extent to which foils contain Plastic (which I would not be able to justify). "Okay but can I also stamp the spines" is its own whole separate Thing.

Most of the information I'm managing to find focusses on cardmaking and involves a specialist printer that will accept materials of maximum thickness of around 2mm, which are not exactly, ah, relevant. But surely some of you have already fallen down this rabbit hole, or at least can tell me what I should be searching for to get slightly less frustrating results? How ridiculously expensive and impractical would a home set-up be given that I have no desire to set up my own stationery monogramming cottage business? Are there places that offer this as a service for notebooks that have already been written in as opposed to ones you're buying from them new??? etc!

Last year I did not, but wrote a list of things I'd want to do if I were.

But, you see, Adam loaned one of his pens to someone at the last Admin event of the year, and I-know-not-how they mangled the nib on the poor thing way beyond my confidence to fix (tines both splayed and misaligned, both quite badly)... and the cheapest and easiest way to get it sorted is probably, actually, to take it to the local pen show, conveniently three days before my provisional surgery date, and therefore I am grimly planning AN TREET.

( Read more... )

Didn't manage to talk myself into getting a Traveler's Notebook set-up from the Galen seconds sale before the colour & size I was interested in had sold out. Did pine about this somewhat.

... jumped on being second in line when a Moterm in deep teal came up on the FountainPensUK buy/sell/trade group over on Facebook last week. And it arrived today!

So far I have fondled it happily and peered at its workings and contemplated the notebooks it came with (blank/lined/grid); blank can be for poetry (maybe), grid is extremely multi-purpose I just need to decide on a purpose (given that I've got lots of potentials), and I am not thrilled about lined because I mostly eschew lined paper but idk I'll come up with something. (These days I am dot-grid all the way.)

So obviously I happily added the new notebook to the list of notebooks I've bought in the notebook where I track that (this notebook is discbound, and also includes keeping a vague record of how fast I go through the ludicrously expensive conditioner, how many pens exactly it is that I own, Irish irregular verb tables, and Notes On Computer Games). Which all starts to feel a bit recursive, so then I went and bought some cookbooks.

(This is an unhelpful summary. In fact I blithely quoted Molesworth at somebody, realised I didn't know if they recognised a Molesworth and clarified that it was Molesworth, they were one of today's lucky 10,000, and now I've got two copies of the compendium en route to me for really not much money, one for them and one for lending. In the process of noodling around eBay for cheap books I somehow wound up putting in a second order with a different vendor for a different 20% off offer, and now en route to me are Short and Sweet so I can add the recipe in there I definitely care about to the EYB account; the unrevised The Perfect Scoop, because the library doesn't have it and I'd forgotten a revised and updated version exists; and Leiths How to cook... Desserts, which was the only one of that set of four I still didn't have. Booksss.)

(This is a terrible hobby.)

Specifically, I am Seriously Contemplating the merits of something in a Traveler's Notebook format. Not from Traveler's Company themselves, because why would I do that when I could get it in (... discount...) teal, but.

Anticipated uses for Multiple Inserts:

• long-term reference notes for Admin: the LRP, and possibly also my packing lists for same
• setting myself up to have a Dedicated Poetry Space again to see if that nudges me into writing a bit more, maybe???
• one notebook per medical condition, so that I wind up with long-term What Happened In Which Appointment notes all in one place instead of spread across annual notebooks
• maybe allotment records ditto???

( I already own so many notebooks. )

At least until I have actually used the small stash of them I have Accumulated without ever having actually bought one. Yes yes yes, the Clairefontaine that was a freebie with a pen purchase is ruled not blank/gridded/dotted, but it's an excellent test case for the format, self.

Which has at least caused me to realise that actually the thing I want to store in that slot in the pen case is almost certainly one of the blocks of large-format Post-Its, because I don't yet have a good way of carrying those around and they are something I Actively Want.

(I'm busy reassessing How And What I Carry Around now that I'm spending more time on my feet; my Primary Notebook is fairly bulky; I really don't like taking notes on my auxiliary internet devicephone, to the point that I just... don't. The fact that a pocket notebook fits in my pen case is kind of irrelevant because I don't actually tend to have my pen case on me unless I've also got the Primary Notebook, and I definitely don't want the degree of barrier-to-entry that is having to fish around in a larger bag for the pen case. But if I just have a pocket notebook In My Pocket then I am also going to need A Pocket Writing Implement, and the pen in my penknife is both Dead and Painfully Small. ... though at least one of those is fixable, and possibly I should. Hmm.)

Things I am spending lots of time on: shaking the internet to see if I can make Satisfying Review Blogs fall out. Earlier this week the focus was the Roterfaden Taschenbegleiter, which I do not want and am highly unlikely to ever acquire, but about which brain was Very!!! Definite!!! about read-ALL-the-reviews. This means that, for example, I am now aware of the existence of double pen-loop closures.

Other things that have crossed my radar:

• the King Jim Magflap Clipboard, as reviewed at The Pen Addict: I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS, PRIMARY AMONG WHICH IS "OKAY BUT YOU'RE SHOWING PAPERS PRINTED DUPLEX AND SOMEHOW TOTALLY FAILING TO ADDRESS THE QUESTION OF HOW YOU READ AND MARK UP THE REVERSE SIDES OF THE PAGES???"
• Midori metal index clips, inexplicably absent from their main website, which I have caved and ordered some of because the book darts aren't actually the right tool for the specific job I want done. (I am sincerely hoping that these actually are the claimed 0.15mm thickness, i.e. equivalent to the book darts, apparently resulting in a whole bunch of places claiming that the "paper" penguin clips are 0.15mm thick when they extremely are not. Unrelatedly, I have a set of Midori penguin clips that don't really work for what I'd intended them for...)
• as mentioned yesterday, the Leonardo MZG Juma dragon skin Blue, thankfully extremely sold out and therefore in no way shape or form a meaningful temptation
• the reason people keep referring to the Traveler's Notebook format as "A5 slim" is bECAUSE A BUNCH OF RETAILERS ARE DOING THIS. I! am having! a whole entire indignant autism! about THAT'S NOT HOW ISO STANDARDS WORK. >:(

• having just been derogatory about 16 Amazing Uses For Washi Tape In Your Bullet Journal, I have promptly discovered that I do in fact have a use for something sufficiently closely resembling #1 Washi Tape Swatches!!! that I... cannot reasonably claim it Isn't... that. (specifically: I have decided I do want to actually keep track of what everything is and who made it and where I bought it from, because if nothing else I'm annoyed I can't work out where I acquired the current Spring Flowers situation.)
• PERSIMMON HAS ITS FIRST SET OF GROWN-UP LEAVES (by which I mean "they are still rolled up in a tiny tight little cone" but also "THEY EXIST AND I CAN SEE THEM")
• finally caught up on migrating my various todo items from last year's notebook to this year's notebook...
• ... while half-listening to the support act for The Mountain Goats this evening
• yes I enjoyed the gig very much thank you and might now at SOME point actually LISTEN to any of their other songs (bonus points for balance/diction/etc such that I could pick up lots of the lyrics to unfamiliar music)

(I have been asked about this elseweb and want a static place to link to!)

( more detail )

(it's all the way over there; I have spent most of today asleep or dozing though blessedly not actually feverish; I have a bunch of other things to do; etc)

... but if I were... well, I wrote myself a list of things I'd like to do, earlier, and here it is.

( Read more... )