kaberett | Entries tagged with stationery

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!

This post is not even about how the paper Moterm use for their TN-format inserts is Not Fountain Pen Friendly, oh no. Instead it is about Notebook Charms.

You see, I keep finding myself browsing Etsy inter alia for "notebook charms", despite all the reasons I might perfectly well not want any (a faff! a propensity to tangle! nothing being quite right! is this even my #aesthetic???).

Separately, Or So I Thought, at the last Admin: the LRP event of the year I got to do my magic trick for the blacksmith (i.e. showed up at his stall holding an object he'd given up on and had no idea had been reported missing to me) and, in exchange, got a present. Not on a cord! Just the object by itself. Which, to be clear, I am delighted by -- but about which I had been having quite a "??? what??? do??? with this object???"

... so yeah this evening it finally occurred to me to combine these two Problems. I did not succeed! (For success I will need more fine motor control, via less tiredness, and also probably narrower-nosed pliers than anything I had within easy reach of the sofa). But I definitely like the idea, the pendant is now safely ensconced within the zippy pouch within the notebook, in the process of digging out the pendant I found another Object of my own I'd been increasingly antsy about having replaced, and -- most importantly of all -- I am no longer browsing Etsy. ~~Instead I'm Considering a lies-to-children atom made out of a bicycle spoke.~~ GOOD JOB ME.

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.

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I spent ... some ... time on Thursday night very concerned that I had Broken My Fancy Pen. (The pen I am using most in the field is a Pilot Vanishing Point/Capless, which I got very cheap second hand because it was a little bit dinged up already, where by "very cheap" if you are not a pen person I mean "add at least one more zero", and if you are a Pen Person I mean "remove one zero".) The actuation -- it's a clicky pen -- wasn't properly actuating, in that it was feeling spongy and squishy and generally sluggish and Did Not Want To Work Properly.

I was relieved the following morning to discover that actually it was entirely fine.

... and it was not until dusk when the air temperature dropped precipitously again, and it started happening again, that I realised that Possibly and Perhaps what was going on was It Doesn't Like Cold Weather.

(I have not yet gathered further data i.e. asked pen people on the internet if they've had similar experiences.)

Meanwhile today a player correctly identified the pen I was using from a brief glimpse, with nontrivial awe about Being So Close To One Of Those, and while under most circumstances players don't get to use anything but the lending biro I keep in my pocket at ~~all~~ most times for this precise purpose, on this occasion I moved to offer to let them try it, and was vindicated in this decision when they, wide-eyed, asked If I Was Sure.

(It went fine! They enjoyed themself! I'm a little sad it was the EF nib on suboptimal paper, but hey, they had fun and the pen came back to me in one piece.)

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.)

(Minor injury.)

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(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. )

One of the things my ongoing attempt to Read All The Stationery Reviews has turned up... is an entry point to the German stationery nerds blogging community. On the basis that if I'm going to be reading this stuff I had might as well also be practising languages (I've learned pretty much all the specialist vocabulary in English at this point, so clearly I need to move on), I have been working my way through archives.

Bleistift (mostly in English? significantly in English?) I first came across thanks to a really helpful article on disc binding systems (I think at the point I was dithering over whether I wanted to buy a punch; at that point I was doing a more targetted special interest so I read all of their posts on disc binding but didn't dive into the rest of the archives).

Yesterday, via literally the search string "stationery review blog" (this is what I am presently reduced to. there are SO MANY OTHER THINGS I could be doing.) I found Scrively, grumpily scrolled back until I found the text reviews, and read enough to decide to go back to the very beginning. (I cannot at this point remember whether it was via them or somewhere else -- possibly TheCramped? aha, yes, TheCramped -- that I stumbled, yesterday, across Ugmonk's Analog, which I keep going back to to stare at some more in something that is not quite either horror or fascination...)

... and then. Via scrolling down the front page at Bleistift. I came across... well. It's actually a post about a department store in Hamburg, but it comes with the side note

Thanks to my wife I walked away with Caran d’Ache’s Nespresso pencils (more about them at Pencil Talk) and my first ever “Les crayons de la maison” pencils (more about them at Lexikaliker, who discovered that this series is not quite what it is made out to be).

In some trepidation I clicked that link to Lexikaliker, and... BEHOLD: A PENCIL SCANDAL. with SCIENCE.

( Summary! )

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 device~~phone, 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.)

... is Midori Chiratto Index Clips (Japanese site, because they are bafflingly not listed on the English page).

Unlike the penguins, which Cult Pens unhelpfully listed (at the time I bought them) as 0.15mm thick (they aren't; I suspect the dimensions were copied over from a listing for these things) they actually are thin in enough to slip in without distorting the paper! And unlike the book darts, the tiny sticking-out tab is in fact exactly what I want for the various notebook pages I want to flip back to frequently.

Which are, because I am currently very much on a HI EVERYBODY TELL ME ABOUT YOUR NOTEBOOKS kick: migraine log; Pilates log; pending list (i.e. things where I'm waiting for a reply or a parcel or similar); Admin:the LRP packing list, and (tentatively) a list of Object Categories And Locations I would like to Declutter (progress on that front today! notwithstanding the new stationery and 150l of compost).

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. >:(

I had the amazing (to me, personally, and basically nobody else) realisation yesterday that I could solve Several of my in-a-field problems relating to lost property tracking by... pre-punching lost property report slips and storing them in that event's booklet. This fixes (at least in theory) both the issue of "actually making it to the punch so I can file things properly takes... time and focus..." and that of "the stack of blank slips is liable to get dripped on or blown away or misplaced or..." -- so some of today's playing-with-stationery was DOING THAT with the stack of spares I had already printed, and they are now neat and tidy and we'll see how well this actually works next event.
other playing with stationery: washi swatch page (...) now exists (.....), and I have in the process successfully established where I got the thing I'm currently using, and its probable name, and confirmed that it is no longer available for sale; and Placed An Order having established that USPS really does just cost that much these days, good grief, so there will shortly be More on its way to me, most of which I have actual plans for...
aaaaaaaaand yesterday I received a text message informing me that I had another gynaecology appointment booked! on the day The Consultant will be in! less than a month away! ... on the Friday of next event!!! so I have texted back to rebook that one, because I actually enjoy being in a field and don't want to absent myself (and A) from training/firefighting/etc for the sake of Having A Ginormous Anxiety, so they can fit me in Some Other Time. Thanks.

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)

(Sorry in advance about the inevitable linkrot in this one.)

WASHI TAPE: is basically fancy masking tape, i.e. paper tape with a low-tack adhesive that can be easily repositioned... but make it decorative.

There are semi-reasonable uses for washi tape, most of which are (to my mind) "wrapping presents", though it is apparently also very popular in Scrapbooking.

And then there is the whole [gestures] bullet journal... ecosystem.

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

( more detail )

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:

a blue leather notebook cover, a grey linen-covered notebook, a fountain pen, and some decorative bits and pieces

[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 zipfolios (ocean blue, forest green) plus carded embroidery floss

[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...

(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.

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So that notebook? That was Very Nearly Perfect? But that I was planning to wait until the end of January to buy any more of, even though I could only find another 3 currently for sale in the UK?

... I had entirely forgotten that the paper used to make it is no longer in production. So, er, I kind of. bought. the remaining stock. last night.

On a different but related topic, I am pleasantly surprised by just how well I am getting on with the Vanishing Point in this context! Some of it is apparently stabbing myself with the knock is acceptable where using my thumbs is not; there is a whole bunch more field-test to go but I might not actually be selling this on as rapidly as I'd assumed I would...

Per comments on yesterday's post: I think I found it. A5, linen-bound hardcover, sewn lay-flat binding, 256 (!!!) pages, dot grid, ribbon bookmarks, page numbers (not in my absolute preferred location but in what is definitely second-best). Thread is light blue i.e. extremely relevant to my #aesthetic. Paper is Cosmo Air Light: possibly slightly off-white, definitely fountain pen-friendly, haven't actually used it before and don't know what I think of it but definitely Worth A Try.

Additionally and furthermore I found a UK stockist and more-or-less immediately placed an order, so it might even arrive with tomorrow's post. I then need to hold off on buying a multi-year supply of the things until at least the end of January, which should give me a decent chance to work out if it is actually The Notebook Of My Dreams Made Manifest, but -- cautious delight!

So of course it was only then that I remembered that I'd read multiple positive reviews of the things (UK Fountain Pens and Mountain of Ink) -- though admittedly those were for variants with prints I'm not fond of used on the cover, and with a lower page-count.

I am also, obviously, wisting slightly over the limited edition A5 Cahier Momiji; it's not something I' actually use but I'm enjoying looking at the pictures of it.

Doubtless I will report back In Great Detail at... some point.

My ideal notebook:

A5
hardcover, ideally a cotton or linen or other hardwearing natural fibre but definitely Not Plastic
sewn lay-flat binding
240 pages (or more! more is also good! but 240 just about fits a year the way I'm currently using them.)
white fountain-pen friendly paper (don't care about ghosting/showthrough)
5mm dot grid
two ribbon bookmarks
page numbers

And I cannot find anything that does everything. Citrus Book Bindery would have done, give or take my preference for cover texture/material, buuut since I ordered their paper sampler pack and now they've dropped the paper I liked best (120gsm extra smooth) and consequently, having juuust about convinced myself to maybe spring for one as a Special Treat, I am Petulant.

Leuchtturm is cream paper only and also I turn out to be really good at scuffing up the covers. Atoms to Astronauts is 180 pages and one bookmark and also I think they don't have page numbers. The Stamford Notebook Co. is 160 pages in A5, and I can't actually work out if it has page numbers or bookmarks. Black n' Red have white paper and dot grid but don't do bookmarks or enough pages. Archer & Olive have lovely covers and white paper and dot grid options and ribbon bookmarks but are otherwise unsuitable. I have Taken Agin Rhodia in part because "vegan leather". I have failed to make Clairefontaine disgorge anything relevant to my interests. I've poked through the Stationery Nerd mega journal review and keep not loving anything.

It is very! difficult! to be me!

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who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

[stationery] next ridiculous question!

[stationery] in which I am thwarted

[stationery] this year I am going to the London (Autumn) Pen Show

[fieldposting] some things! a post!

[stationery] ... new notebook day >>

[stationery] rite of passage

[stationery] oh no i'm talking myself into getting Another notebook

[stationery] DECADE-OLD PENCIL DRAMA

[stationery] things I am not allowed to buy: pocket notebooks

[stationery] today's delight

the stationery special interest is back in force

another bulletin

some things make a post!

[stationery] in which I talk about my current hyperfixation

[bujo] some of my current health tracking

the longest day, the shortest night

I am not going to the London pen show tomorrow

[stationery] so much for restraint

[stationery] ... law of complaining!

[stationery] surely! this is not! as niche a desire! as it appears to be!

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