Colorverse Black Hole ink bottle, which has an unusual teardrop shaped base. This is the front view showing the bit sticking out on one side. The illustration has a stylized black hole and a little planet saying “SOS” on it.

Love that little picture on the front.  The bottle has a teardrop shaped base which I guess makes it a bit less likely to tip over and mostly just makes it interesting.

Colorverse Black Hole ink bottle, which has an unusual teardrop shaped base. This is thebottom view showing the teardrop shape, though it sits nice and flat because of the flat label on the front.

Inside, the ink is as one expects, a pleasant black.  There’s a tiny bit of sheen visible in the swatch on the right, and indeed I can see that in my writing occasionally if I look at it under a sufficiently bright light, but it’s more a cute coincidence than a regular feature of the ink on the paper I’m using.  Might be fun to try it on the iroful paper to see if it happens more consistently there; my current notebook is a leuchtterm.

My swatch card for Colorverse Black Hole, a black ink with a tiny hint of sheen in the bigger swatches.

I’m not too worried about getting the sheen to show up more, though, since the only other black ink bottle I have is a black with sheen from Inkvent Black (uuuh, Good Tidings I think it was called?).  I’m guessing that Black Hole dries quicker, though I didn’t actually test that.  I did, however, have some fun painting with it in the margins of my journal.

Some margin patterns in my notebook using Colorverse Black Hole ink on a paintbrush. One side has curly vine-like shapes, the other a geometric zig-zag with partial triangles.

Fun bottle and a nice practical ink.  Overall a very nice present!  And I think this is the last ink bottle or sample I had that I hadn’t swatched in my collection, so I’m all caught up and there’s no ink purchases on my horizon until the weather warms up, and maybe not even then — I’ve got so much to play with now!

The package came with the prettiest stamp on it:

Wonder Pens Stationary Shop stamp, featuring a scene inside an ink jar with a squirrel writing and a cat reading a book while sitting on top of a stack of books. there are stars sparkling over their heads.

And here’s what was inside:

A set of items from my order: a wide flat case from Lihit Labs, a regular sized traveler’s notebook, a small bottle of stamp ink, a clip and converter for my kaweco liliput pen, a blank passport sized traveler’s notebook with a zipper case to match, and a pretty postcard with a photo of a collection of year of the horse themed stamps on it.

Since it’s what motivated me to do a purchase, let’s start with the clip for my pen.

The Liliput Clip fits nicely and most importantly, has solved my problem.  Now the pen clips securely into the pencil case I use for my journal setup and it doesn’t slip out into my bag, the couch, or wherever I’m writing. I love this pen a lot but it was absolutely an escape artist. I decided to go with a more complementary colours vibe instead of getting the silver and I still haven’t made up my mind if that was the right choice (so it probably wasn’t) but I don’t care enough to get a second clip when this won’t transfer to my other kaweco pens.  I also picked up a spare folding converter.  I already had one of the regular ones and one of the folding ones and I’d been a bit mystified by the folding one because it didn’t make any difference in the kaweco sport — they both fit and have the same ink capacity.  But it turns out that if you try to use the old converter in the liliput, the plunger has to be half depressed or it won’t fit in the body of the pen, so suddenly the folding piston thing makes a lot more sense.  I didn’t desperately need a 3rd converter but now I’ve got the option if I want to ink all three kaweco pens at once.  I do like them for travel because they’re easy to fill and clean in a hotel room and don’t hold much ink, so it might happen!

I’ve been been using a TN sized notebook as a kind of “everything notebook” for work and commuting, and I’d already squashed a few pages when something else in my backpack fell in between them.  This happens to me a lot, which is why I prefer zippered holders for my notebooks.  I switched to using an A5 “ghost whale” pouch that I already had, the same type I had used for my whole journalling setup for quite a wihle, but it didn’t fit well and I found it unsatisfying.  It turns out that the Lihit Labs flat wide case was the right size, so I added it to my order.  I also grabbed two spare TN notebook refills, one to use immediately so I could separate my personal and work notebooks, the other on hand for when I filled one or the other up.

My work bullet journal (a lochby TN sized notebook with a TN zipper case used as a cover) slipped into the front pocket of the new Lihit Labs flat wide pencil case. It fits but it it’s sticking out of the top a little.

Just in case you were wondering: one notebook does fit into the front pocket.  With the zipper case on, it sticks out a bit, but without the case it kisses the edge of the zipper. I know it’s hard to figure out what will fit from online listings so I thought I’d post a photo. Having it in the front wouldn’t work for me, since I was aiming to keep the notebook from getting banged up in my backpack, but if you’re not stuffing things in your bag in a hurry when you get to the right bus stop, or you just cared more about fitting pens in the case, this would probably work?  It does fit better in the inside pockets, though I actually use the inside pocket for a pencil board instead and just leave the notebook floating in the middle for easy “flip open and write” usage.

Inside of the Lihit Labs Flat wide case, showing some pens on the left and a traveler’s notebook pencil board on the right. The latter is also in the inner pocket, showing that it fits snugly but there’s enough room to close the zipper without any difficulty.

Honestly, I could probably do without the plastic zipper case now that the notebooks are protected in a different way, but I like being able to swap pretty stickers into the back where I can see them and it’s fun to be able to “glue” the two notebooks together by tucking a cover into each side of the non-zippered edge.  I don’t think anyone cares what notebook I’m writing in at work but it’s nice that I can grab them both when I’m going to sit away from my desk with a coffee for a bit and write whatever’s on my mind.  I’ve been doing a lot of writing at work just to organize my thoughts while I’m ramping up and it’s helping with the information overload.

The Lihit Labs pencil case opened to show some pens in the pocket on the left and the same notebook with cover on the right, although the notebook has been flipped over so you can see the stickers inside the zipper pouch. Prominent is one with an animal bones motif (from fireside textiles/tonkai) and some washi dots are visible behind.

Now that I’ve been using both notebooks, I will say that the Lochby refill that I got as a surprise “oopsie out of stock” substitution from The Gentleman Stationer is clearly a slight upgrade over the official TN refill.  The paper is a little more resilient against feathering, there’s nice stitching so it lies a bit more flat, I like the rounded corners, and it has a slightly thicker cover.  It’s probably not enough of an upgrade to be worth the cost and hassle of cross border shopping, but it was a generous substitution and if I were still in the US I’d probably stock up on them instead of the TN ones.

The passport sized notebook and zipper case were so I could duplicate my “covered notebook with sticker space” commuter notebook in a size that would sit in my smallest purse.  Here it is with a little yamamoto ro biki book that I’d been toting around before I got the case.  You can see it’s a little squished from use.  I use the smallest purse for a lot of trips where I’m going to be on my feet most of the day because extra weight is hard on my body, but it’s nice to have a tiny notebook that my kid or I can draw in if we stop for a snack, and kid’s at the age where people give him stickers and it’s nice to have a pouch to put them in or flexible plastic to put them on because he doesn’t want to lose them.  I’m honestly a little miffed that the zipper case in passport size has card sized slots because I think it would look prettier without, but I guess that’s what I get for not actually buying something intended as a notebook cover.

A rust coloured Yamamoto Ro Biki notebook with a stylized tree on it with spindly long branches and round dots for leaves. It has a plastic TN passport “zipper case” over the notebook being used as a cover.

The stamp ink I haven’t used yet, but it’s for this auto-advancing number stamp I got with the intention of quickly stamping page numbers into notebooks that didn’t have them.  Unfortunately the ink that came with it takes forever to dry so the process isn’t quick at all and I have to blot the stamps or they take days to fully dry.  I don’t know if the midori stamp ink will be better, but since I was already going to be paying for shipping I figured it was worth a shot.  I haven’t gotten around to cleaning out the stamp pad and trying it, though.

A close up of a dot grid notebook with the page number “22” stamped inside. You can see that there’s some messy ink transfer from the stamp on the facing page.

I avoided adding fountain pen ink to this order because it was so cold and I didn’t want to risk having a bottle freeze solid and break en route.  Thankfully the stamp ink came in a forgiving little plastic container and there were no problems.

Overall, I had a nice online shopping experience, and it was such a relief to find somewhere that would send me “back on stock” notifications for the TN notebooks after it turned out my local dealer either doesn’t carry the dot grid ones or they’re just out of stock all the time and I don’t know which.  Hopefully I’ll get to visit Wonder Pens in person some day!  And maybe next order (likely when I need a new planner in the fall), I’ll be able to get some ink.

A very fluffy (Eastern) Blue Jay with a peanut as large as his brain stuffed in his mouth. He’s sitting on a wooden railing overlooking my snowy backyard. He was actually even more fluffy a moment before I took the photo. The weird pattern is from the screen door on my patio.

Possibly I’m not sick of it because of the sheer relief of being here and not there, though. As exhausting as it is to live in a house where you can’t find anything because it’s “in a box” and hasn’t yet been unearthed or it’s been broken by the movers’s terrible packing, it’s hard not to watch people’s driver’s licenses get yoinked overnight in Kansas and think “I’m so glad I got out before they yoinked my work permit like that.”  One of my new co-workers was aghast that I’d abandon a green card, but I’d definitely reached the point where no amount of getting paid more was worth the risks of being declared illegal at any moment.  And then I wasn’t even getting paid more.  Though I *did* just get my promised partial annual bonus from the old job so that was nice.

New job is working out, even if it doesn’t pay as well.   I like my new co-workers and we have interesting discussions about technology and security.  I’m less excited about the constant AI push in corporate land (it feels every single Microsoft product is yelling at me all the time), but I only have to use the parts that have a clear benefit to my work flow, so that’s something.  I’m spending a lot of time on the bus to commute and although I miss having more time with my kid at home, I do like having dedicated time where I don’t get interrupted.  I’ve been enjoying podcasts, audiobooks, mentally writing stories and just having time to think about whatever.  I’m not thrilled to have been hired as hybrid and told I’ll be going back to work 5 days a week in the fall (I definitely wouldn’t have applied for this job if it had been listed as 100% in office) but I’m trying to wait and see how it works out in practice.

This month’s palette was pretty much built around matching those cute corgi stamp stickers.

Stickers

• Corgi food stamp stickers – bought in Japantown San Jose but I don’t know the artist/company.
• Tea Time Bunnies – ByMossyPine
• Tiny Dogs – I think these were from Mind Wave.

Pens & Ink palette

• Pelikan Pura <B> – Endless Alchemy Golden Sunburst.  I mostly bought this ink as a fidget because of the lovely bottle which is designed to be swirled, but I decided to see how I like it in a pen too.
• TWSBI Eco <1.1 stub> – Diamine Apple Glory.  I bought this ink specifically for this pen!
• Pilot Metropolitan <CM> – Ikebana Cowslip.  Accidentally got some green ink on the nib while wiping it off after filling, so this may not be the right colour in my notebook.  Oh well!
• Pilot E95S <M> – Diamine Marie Rose.  From the latest inkvent.

Quick check in on creative goals

2026 Goals List

Creative space: My office is set up enough to be usable for work and for writing, haven’t quite figured out the desk situation enough work on painting yet.  There are still a lot of boxes but I’ve switched most of them to be clear ones so I can at least find things, and I suspect there’s at least a couple of boxes missing still. I’ve got an initial stationary shelf started (see photo below) but I’m thinking I’ll use drawers for most of my inks and samples and I haven’t decided where in the shelf those should go.

Crafting for the climate: Finished a scarf for my kid and a sweater for me.  Still working on a very complicated scarf for my husband, but it’s definitely not getting finished before it warms up this year!

Painting with fountain pen ink: not set up for this yet but I did get some more watercolour painting books from the library so I’ve got some exercises to do once I figure out where the heck my watercolour paper got packed (or give up and buy more; I’ll use it eventually.)

Writing: wrote a bunch of fanfic for a valentines event and I’m really happy with how things turned out.  Got a few things in progress and with all the ao3 downtime the past couple of days I fit some extra writing time in.

Let’s talk inks:

Showing 5 samples to finish out the calendar!

Day 21: Chaos. Deep burgundy with green sheen. I think this ink is considerably more attractive than last year’s Sleigh Ride, so it might actually get used. Not in love with it, though.

Day 22: Pineapple Spritz. Yellow with yellow iridescent sparkle. This ink is very pretty but only barely legible in my journal even with a dip pen so it may get relegated to decorative status because I doubt it’s going to be better in a regular pen. It’s really pretty with all that shimmer so I’ve got some hope that it might be fun for painting or filling in tracking squares or something.

Day 23: Let It Snow. Bright blue with blue iridescent shimmer. Absolutely the kind of fancy holiday ink that I wanted out of this calendar. Love it. Describing it makes it sound similar to Brrr! but it’s not a pigment ink so it should be a bit less of a hassle in a pen. And it is a very different bright blue instead of the more moody Brrr! blue.

Day 24: Antler. Light brown. Fairly similar to Smoky Tobacco from day 4 but with less yellow and more of a pink feel to the brown. Also, it doesn’t stink. Basically better in every way than Smoky Tobacco thanks to the lack of scent. I’ll use this one and possibly never open Smoky Tobacco again.

Day 25: Myrrh the Merrier. Blue with red sheen and blue sparkles. This is the 30ml bottle and it’s completely over the top holiday ink. I expected something more green-leaning for Inkvent Teal and this really reads as blue to me especially with the blue shimmer, so I would have swapped this with day 1’s Celestial Skies if I were Diamine. But it’s a really lovely ink and I’m excited to use it.

Overall: I had fun with this year’s calendar despite how busy my December was! Most of these inks are good additions to my collection: I’m glad to try some pigment inks, I’m excited about a lot of the colours, and there were only a few disappointments. If I’m honest with myself about what inks I reach for most, I’ve got to admit that I don’t really need more shimmer or sheening inks so maybe I shouldn’t get an inkvent calendar next year. If I’m talking purely about inks I use most, I should focus on getting a few more “standard” inks. But if I treat it as an experience, it’s definitely been fun! It expanded my ink collection in a few ways I might not have done otherwise: I was curious about pigment inks but hadn’t worked up the nerve to buy any and now they’re right there — I’m especially excited to try them in art. Some of this year’s colours wouldn’t have been on my radar if I was shopping but they’re going to work so well in my monthly palettes. So I’m absolutely not sad to have done it again this year, and I’m excited to play with these more in 2026!

Stickers

• dinos with shiny hearts (stickii, no artist listed)
• doggies with sweaters (stickii, no artist listed)
• valentines objects (Neko Mori Arts via stickii)
• Katrinkles (from an advent calendar)

Using up some unfinished valentines sheets from last year!

Fountain Pens and Inks

• Pilot E95S <m> – Diamine Blush (Inkvent 2025)
• Kaweco Liliput <b> – Van Dieman’s Underflow
• Pelikan Pura <b> – Diamine Ruby Taffeta (Inkvent 2025)
• Pelikan Pina Colada <m> – Diamine Celestial Skies (Inkvent 2025)

Leaning into the new inks for this month: three from the Inkvent calendar I just opened and one new ink from Fountain Pen Day (November 2025).  Celestial Skies is continuing from last month.

Commuter Stationary

• TWSBI Eco T <m> – Organics Studio Nitrogen
• Pilot Kakuno <m> – Robert Oster Rose Gold Antiqua
• Lochby TN-sized dot grid refill
• Traveler’s Notebook zipper pouch (used as a cover)

The new part of this is the Kakuno — I was finding that I really missed swapping in colours day to day to make it really obvious where yesterdays’ stuff started.  I’d bought the Kakuno to be my purse pen (cheap, light, easy to write with) but it hasn’t gotten used in a while because I was rotating other pens in and out.  I’m not sure I’m going to love Rose Gold Antiqua in this pen (I’ve had trouble with it clogging in other pens) but I’ll give it a shot since I’m trying to use up some samples and it is a pretty ink when it works. 

The Eco has been working beautifully, and I love Nitrogen’s shine on the Lochby paper.  The notebook itself has worked out nicely for commuting — I mostly write with it at work and it’s a mix of work notes, todo lists for home, journal-style entries, and creative writing.  I may eventually get a second TN-sized refill to be just a work notebook, but for now the everything notebook format is working well.  It’s a little bit less weight, I can get by with the zip case as cover, and I’ll use up the refill faster this way.

In the same vein: the plan is to write these pens dry unless I run into clogging problems, so you likely won’t see these next month!

And In Unrelated News…

I finally went and found a plugin that replaces WordPress’s Block Mode editor.  I’ve never been a huge fan, but lately it’s been… hanging?  Not switching blocks?  Whatever is happening, it’s actually been getting in the way of writing a lot lately.  So far this is the first thing I’ve written with the new old-style editor and it’s really helped.

Painting continues, so here’s a photo of Hatch who looked at the cardboard I put on the floor and thought “must be a dog bed.”

And then, immediately, “don’t take my picture!”

Anyhow, let’s talk inks.

Day 17: Gala. A nice shading purple. I really like this one! It’s a little more pink than J Herbin Violette Pensée, which is the closest thing in my collection. I’m pretty much always going to have the My Little Pony song “At the Gala” stuck in my head when I use this, especially since it’s a very twilight sparkle kind of purple.

Day 18: Laurel. Dark teal-leaning green base with so much red sheen that it’s more of a red ink than a green one. I like this one but I do wish it had a little less sheen so you could get more of the base colour, and it is very similar to Vibe from last year so it’s kind of boring in context. Still, viewed on its own it’s a fun ink and I appreciate that it’s a lot more green than all the other pink sheen inks I have. I wonder why I never see a deep red with the pink sheen? Something chemical or it just doesn’t look as cool in product photos?

Day 19: Overcast. A dual-tone ink that’s grey-blue with a pink tone. This one is really lovely, but unfortunately very close to my Fountain Pen Day purchase of Van Dieman’s Underflow. Underflow is a bit brighter and more green so they’re not exactly duplicates just very similar. I’ll use both!

Day 20: Ambiance. A peachy orange with pink sparkles. This one is unique in my collection — the closest ink I have has gold shimmer and despite the photo above making it look more gold, this one is definitely more of a pink shimmer when viewed head-on. I like it!

These are all lovely and will get used, though I feel like Laurel could have been more interesting with less sheen. I think Ambiance is the one I’m most excited to ink up and use in my journal, but probably Overcast and Gala will see more use over time due to the lack of shimmer.

And in the meantime, here’s some ink swatches!

Day 13: Molten Basalt. Grey with a reddish sheen. Normally I’m not a huge fan of greys because they’re either dark enough to mostly look black in practice, or they’re light enough that they’re kind of annoying to read without bringing much joy to my writing. (I like saturated colours!) But the sheen is enough to make this one interesting, and I like the name.

Day 14: Mittens. Hot pink pigment ink. I have no idea what could possibly call for waterproof Barbie pink ink in my life, but I love how saturated and unapologetic the colour looks. This one didn’t stain as badly as Brr! did but I was also a bit more careful about soaking the brush a few seconds after I was done using it.

Day 15: Frostbite. Dark blue with loads of copper shimmer. It looks a bit gold in the picture but its more coppery to my eye. This one’s very pretty and I’d like to see how it does in a pen where the shimmer is likely to be toned down a bit so you can actually appreciate the base colour.

Day 15: Ruby Taffeta. Red with iridescent green shimmer. For some reason the camera picks this up more as a silver but it’s noticeably green to my eyes in real life. This is the red of my dreams, exactly the red I’ve wanted and I’m almost mad that it’s got shimmer because it’s such a perfect red. (Look, I bonded with red pens during my stint as an editor, okay?) This will absolutely get used but it’s gonna be really tempting to not bother stirring it up and using it without the shimmer. Not that the shimmer is bad, but the slightly greenish iridescence isn’t what I would have chosen to go with such a glorious red. If anyone knows of a match for this colour without the shimmer, let me know!

Overall: I love all of these. Ruby Taffeta is probably my favourite, but Molten Basalt may get inked up more often due to the lack of shimmer. I do have some pinks similar to Mittens but they’re not pigment inks so it’s really a different beast. And the rest are all pretty different to what I had before!

Day 9: Bittersweet. Very bright green, no shimmer or sheen. I thought maybe this one would be a bit hard to read but it seems fine. It’s not quite as day-glow as it looks in that photo but it is pretty bright in the sun. I love greens and a lot of my other light greens are a bit muddy in comparison so it’s fairly unique in my collection. Will get used for sure.

Day 10: Nostalgia. Brownish burgundy/purple with pink shimmer. Very pretty, and I rather liked playing with it on the paint brush where it’s a bit lighter than in the handwriting. Not a colour I might have chosen for myself but I’m looking forwards to using it because I think it’s going to fill a nice neutral-adjacent niche in my monthly palettes.

Day 11: Brrr! Light blue with blue shimmer. I love this colour a lot but it stained the heck out of my paintbrush. Which isn’t a huge deal (I mean, it’s a paint brush, it was bound to happen eventually) but I’d probably have used an older brush if I’d realized it would be that bad. Maybe I’ll try some pen cleaner or the ultrasonic cleaner on the paintbrush just to see what happens but I don’t have high hopes. It’s a pigment ink so it shouldn’t be a surprise but I didn’t have as much trouble with Carousel and staining. I’m going to be careful to put this into my pens that are easier to clean and none of the ones with clear feeds. I do rather like how the swatch feathered a bit so it looks like frost, though!

Day 12: Bubbly. A very champagne gold with iridescent shimmer. This doesn’t look too bad in the swatch but the shading makes it go to the edge of hard to read in my journal writing. I’ll be curious to see if it behaves better or worse in a pen. This is another one I wouldn’t likely have chosen for myself, but the iridescent shimmer really makes it pop and live up to the name, plus it’s not like anything else in my collection.

I liked all of these inks a lot, though I’m going to have to be careful using Brrr! now that I know it stains.

We’re kind of rattling around in a large empty house at the moment, and there’s some stress going on with the moving company and the internet setup, but at this point most of the scariest parts of this adventure are over. Unless you’re our anxiety-ridden pandemic dog, who now has to meet a lot of strangers who come into the house. Thankfully he’s got lots of other nice things to enjoy that make up for the stress. He particularly likes the kid’s new game that he calls “melt the dog” which involves turning on the fireplace next to the dog bed and watching Hatch slowly sprawl out. I’m not sure why the kid thinks this is hilarious but Hatch obviously doesn’t mind. We’re giving kid a few more days of vacation to sleep and adapt before getting him registered in school but that’ll be soon.

It took me a bit before I sat down and made some stationary choices for this month, mostly because cleaning up the remaining drywall dust and flooring sawdust and whatnot took precedence. Also sleeping. A lot of sleeping. And figuring out how things work and where to put stuff. And people stopping by (good for everyone but poor dog).

Stickers

• Japanese birds in costumes for all seasons (Mind Wave)
• Winter Dragons (Sara Capello Illustration for Stickii)

I’ll probably need another sticker sheet but I may just use up some leftover bits. We’ll see how much I write once I’m tired from work.

Fountain Pens & Ink

• Platinum Preppy Wa – Koi pattern <F>. This has the original black cartridge in it.
• Kaweco Liliput <BB> – KWZ Jurassic Treasure
• Pelikan Pina Colada <M> – Diamine Celestial Skies from Inkvent.
• Pilot E95S <M> – Pilot Iroshizuku fuyu-gaki

Two of these are new pens, both from Fountain Pen Day sales but I hadn’t gotten them inked with the chaos of December.

The Liliput has been on my wish list for a while as a shiny upgrade to my kaweco sport pens, which get regularly rotated in and out because I like writing with them but the aesthetics of them have never grabbed me. I’ve only written with it a bit but the nib is lovely and I suspect I’ll get used to having to screw the cap onto the back of the pen though that’s not my favourite. Still, I love the feel of it, so light and satisfying to hold. And the shiny blue looks just as good as I hoped it would. I wasn’t sure if the double-broad nib would be too much, but I rather like it, especially with this super smooth and shiny ink.

The Pelikan Pina Colada was more of an impulse buy because it was cheap and used the same converter I have for the Pelikan Twist. It feels light and maybe looks a bit unappealing because of the plastic, but it has a really nice clip and the grip is more comfortable for me than the one on the Twist. I’ll withhold final thoughts until I see if it handles a month of writing with sparkly Diamine ink. So far it’s not really bringing the sparkle as much as the Twist did, but I don’t think this ink itself is quite as sparkle heavy as the last thing I used in the Twist so who knows. We’ll see if it clogs.

KWZ Jurassic Treasure and Pilot Iroshizuku fuyu-gaki are both inks I’ve had a while but I’m not sure I’ve inked pens with them. I bought the rest the KWZ “all that glitters” line when it came in stock because it is my favourite sparkle ink that works in every pen and it only has 4 colours — I’ve used the blue/silver and orange/gold ones, this is gold/gold and there’s also a green/gold. I hope they make more. I’d love a purple/silver. Fuyu-gaki came in a little set of Pilot inks and I wish it was more red and less orange (the swatch is a bit darker than my writing with a non-dip pen) but it’s a fun colour even if I was really hoping for a good red.

Celestial Skies was possibly my favourite of this year’s Inkvent Teal calendar, so I figured I should ink it first. It’s nice that the gold sparkle goes well with Jurassic Treasure for a lightly matched ink palette.

Notebooks and Bags

This setup hasn’t really changed since I last posted, I think, but here’s a picture since it’s been a little while:

My current notebook setup: Lihit labs pen case with fountain pens, washi, stamps and scissors above, Lochby Field Folio case with a Campus free monthly calendar on one side and a Leuchtturm notebook on the other. There’s a wooden pencil in the pen slot and a sticker sheet barely visible on one side.

All of this is working well for me: I used one of the calendars in the back of the campus diary for swatching inkvent and was impressed at how well it handled even some of the wetter swatches. The Leuchtterm is about half full from my start in October and it also handled some paintbrush swatches of ink. I won’t say I’ve completely gotten used to how much more ghosting it has than some of the other notebooks I’ve tried, but it’s usable and I could see myself using it again if I wanted a higher page count. Mostly I want less page count so I don’t have to carry as much with me, though. The pen case and A5 Field Folio are both great. I’m tempted to try some of Lochby’s other offerings, but they’re a bit thick for what I want out of a purse notebook so this bigger journal setup may be the only place they fit in my life. Oh, also I’m using a little midori calendar stencil instead of calendar stickers this year for the little monthly calendar I put at the start of each month for a quick “what day is it again?” check.

Commuter Stationary Planning

I’m going to be commuting to my new job on the bus several days per week, and I decided that rather than just transferring my existing little purse-backpack notebook back and forth, my commuter backpack should get its own notebook. Not sure yet if I’ll use that for work or it’ll just be for doodles on the bus.

Right now I’ve put together a TN-sized notebook from Lochby and my TN zipper case and stuck them together so the zipper case serves as a notebook cover (I used to use this zipper case stuck to the back of my calendar to hold stickers). I’ll probably fill up my TWSBI Eco with something non-sparkly so I don’t have to worry about clogging. Maybe pull out the bottle of Nitrogen for a bit of sheen, not sure yet.

In practice, the only stationary I really used in my last job was my running todo list notebook. I’ve yet to find a digital to do list that works as well for me as a little paper notebook does. Not sure if that will still be the case but I threw it in the picture with the commuter notebook because there was space. I’ll see if I wind up using it for work or if it will be only for personal lists. Mostly I stick two or three pens and the notebook into the pouch and then into my pocket and use it around the house on days when I will absolutely forget to do things if I don’t write them down, or when I need a little boost of checkboxes to keep me on track.

Stationary Shopping in Canada

Shipping even small stuff from the US seems to cost about $25 minimum so I’m unlikely to do many orders from the US in the future, stationary or not. That’s definitely not a surprise, since before I left it was pretty common for people to put together big group buys of stuff to defray shipping costs. And with the political situation in the US, Canadians are kind of aggressively refusing to shop American and support the whole war machine, which rather makes sense. Thankfully it’s not much of a concern if I can’t shop where I used to: I’ve got a comfortable amount of supplies after my enthusiastic shopping since I started using fountain pens again in 2024, and I could probably write happily without buying anything new for a year or two. Still, I’m intending to find some Canadian stationary/pen stores to shop at, online and maybe offline (I know there’s one near my old apartment that has a small selection). If you know if great stores in Canada that carry fountain pens and ink, let me know!

I don’t have a big wishlist at the moment: maybe some standard inks to balance out my collection which is very dominated by inkvent holiday inks? No pens on my radar right now, since the Liliput was the last one. A friend may be storing his pen lathe in our garage so maybe I’ll get a kit and try turning a pen or two if we get that set up. I’ve got paper and stickers enough to last for probably over a year at my current journalling rate, though I’m always open to stickers when I find new artists I want to support.

New Job

New job starts next week and I’m excited! This was the best team I interviewed with and I’m looking forwards to getting to know them. I’m also very much looking forwards to having income again as we deal with the last moving bills and no doubt new expenses as we figure out what we need in the new house. I’m less looking forwards to a long commute to the office three days a week, but I also have no furniture for my office and for some reason the flooring guys forgot that room so I also have to wait for a new floor… which is all to say that I’m going to be glad to have a desk and proper chair!

Mom, I’m bored

I feel like I should wrap this up somehow but my kid is telling me he is BORED so I guess that’s that. Happy new year!

1. Set up my new creative space

I’m moving (at the time this posts I’ll be en route to my new house!) and will have a whole new office to setup. My needs have changed a lot since I set up my old office around 12 years ago, and it’s going to take a lot of thinking and acquiring of furniture and tools, and probably a bunch of iterations before I settle on a final configuration. I’ve been slowly working my way through the book Structuring Life to Support Creativity by Sandra Tayler so I’ll probably be using some of the exercises there to help me along.

A few things already on my wishlist: I’d like a more dedicated space with better lighting for painting, journaling and photography, as well as better storage for the related tools. My dog would like a space for napping. It might be nice to have a reading/knitting chair for when I want peace and quiet. I’ll be working remotely some of the time so I may need to plan more carefully for privacy when on a call, too.

2. Crafting for my new climate

I’m moving to a much colder area, which leaves lots of room for knitting new accessories and clothes, and maybe some for sewing too. I expect to be making up some warmer mitts and hats and scarves and sweaters, but also possibly adjusting my stash and tools and pattern collections to support more heavyweight knitting.

3. Painting with Fountain Pen Ink

Towards the end of 2025 I got into watercolour painting, and I’d like to mess around more with applying those skills and tools to my fountain pen ink collection. I keep thinking about it and not actually sitting down and doing it, which makes it a perfect candidate for a yearly goal so that I make time!

4. Write for joy

Writing was my substitute goal part way through last year, but I think i’d like to carry it over for 2026 even though I don’t usually do that. I’m going to tweak the goal just a teensy bit for this year and specify that I want to write for joy.

Writing has brought me a lot of joy in 2025 and especially with so many big changes coming for me in 2026 I want to re-affirm that writing for fun (and not just necessary work documentation type stuff) is still a priority to me. Mostly I think this will take the form of more fanfic and personal journal entries, but it could mean conference talks or blog posts or original fiction too. I’ve got a story I want to finish and more I’ve barely started, I want to try more writing prompts, and I think maybe in 2026 I’ll finally try participating in a story gift exchange? There’s a bunch of other ideas down in my brainstorming section that might be worth doing too. I don’t know, but as long as it’s fun it’s going to count. The big idea behind it all is that I need to make sure I have time and space for writing and keep up a regular writing habit even as my schedule changes.

Other brainstorming ideas

These are ideas that didn’t make the cut above, but I like to record them anyhow in case I feel like working on them even if they’re not a big focus of my year.

Writing: talk transcripts/associated blog posts. I have a lot of older talks that I never really made blog posts about.

Writing: more ao3 comments. I love getting comments but I sometimes forget to leave them on other people’s stuff because I read offline a lot! I really need a better system and practice for making sure I leave comments/kudos more often because my current system is not working out great.

Writing: Hone my craft. It’s been a long time since I went to writer’s workshops or anything and honestly I feel like it’d be weird to go into that sort of thing when I’m primarily writing fanfic, but it might be fun to pick up some books on writing or listen to some podcasts or something.

Fiber art: A use what you have goal. My overflowing bins are minis and sets, so maybe one of those?

Fiber art: Publish a pattern. I’ve got at least one that’s 80% ready and would just need photos and stuff.

Fiber art: mending. I always have some to do but maybe it would be good to focus on doing a bit every month?

Fiber art: find a local crafting group?

Painting: complete some kind of challenge, book, lessons?

Music: find a choir? re-join the band? something else?

Games: More silly Scratch games

Games: Learn a “real” engine? (which one?)

Games: Try making html games. are there frameworks for this?

Games: walking game! finally!

1. Revisit Old Goals
2. Try Something New
3. Something Stash Something Write more
4. Game Design

I realized that my original plan to run a stash-focused social media event wasn’t something I wanted to do any more, so I swapped that one to be the more vague but intensely more fun “write more.”

Here’s the mid-year check-in:

Revisit Old Goals

August: Used up some leftover gradients for a sock (goals: self-striping, top to toes). Started a cable sweater (goals: complicated cables, knit a sweater)

September/October: Fall Finish or Frog Along! This is my favourite social media event where we finish languishing projects or reclaim the parts and let them go.

I wanted to focus on finishing things that would allow me to start packing parts of my craft supplies (goal: lesser used crafts, Whittle down the WIPs), so I finished a last couple of spins on my big wooden spinning wheel then packed it up:

And I finished the sampler scarf I’d had on my loom and failed to finish last year, then packed up the loom:

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll be pulling the loom out and re-assembling it anytime soon after I get moved, given how I felt about that last project.

I also made up a little “Chillow Collar” knitted jewellery kit that had been in my stash a while (goal: kits in stash). I totally failed to do some quilting or finish the sand seal my kid had started before he got bored of the sewing. I did get a bunch of work in on my fall sweater before abandoning it for October MKALs, though!

November: Working on xmas presents. They did use some stash yarn I had earmarked for projects, so they fit a few old goals! (goals: gradients, kits in stash)

December: One of my old goals was “toys” so I’m counting the gnome for that! plus I am still working on a sweater which was also an old goal.

Overall, this was a fun goal to recognize 10 years, but it didn’t turn out to be as fun as I hoped. Still a success but I think I’d have been better off choosing a specific goal or two to revisit rather than wading through the whole pile of them every month to find something to do.

Try Something New

I was feeling a bit burned out on coming up with ideas for this goal so I mentally de-prioritized it, but without trying to plan for it I wound up doing some fun new things anyhow:

August: I tried a little bit of bookbinding and then some soap-shaping with my kid. We didn’t work with lye or anything, he just melted soap blocks into fun shapes, and now we have a bunch of tiny soaps with polished rocks in them that he likes to dig out once they’re close to done.

September: This month was “fall finish or frog along” so I didn’t start anything particularly new.

October: Watercolour painting exercises from random books at the library. Some of them turned out really nice!

I also did some hand lettering exercises, but didn’t get as far with that.

November: More watercolours. Also I had to learn an entire web development framework in a “language not on my resume” for a tech interview, which was fun but tiring.

December: I’m also counting the gnome for this because it’s my first time knitting one in DK weight yarn, so I need to adjust the tools I use. And Imagined Landscapes often throws in a new technique or two to play with so who knows maybe i’ll learn something.

So even though I’d been planning to mostly drop this goal, I did some fun new things and didn’t stress about it and it was great. Absolutely finished this one out perfectly.

Write more

Kept chugging on fanfics, including writing for another event. I spent a lot of time in “writing sprints” where we kind of turn writing into something that’s a cross between a pomodoro timer and parallel play. I’ve had writing be a bit social back when I used to write for the Geek Feminism blog, but this is differently social and I love it. I’m starting to understand why every novel I read lately thanks their writing group.

For the blog, I’ve been keeping up with the monthly stationary posts. I’d hoped to spend some more time writing tech stuff in conjunction with my slow job hunt so my blog would look more nerdy again, but I haven’t gotten around to that as much. Turns out planning an international move eats up a lot of time, plus we had more than one medical emergency, and then I spent 3 weeks solo parenting while J flew to Canada to prep our new house. Oh, and I hit my head badly after the dog took off after a squirrel, and healing head injuries is rough and made worse by the fact that most of the signs you’re supposed to watch for are things that I experience regularly: headaches, dizziness, nausea.

The fanfic experience this year has been fantastic and the writing sprints have improved my life and honestly probably my mental health. If you combine the blog and fanfic I’ve published over 100k words this year and have written more that’s still in drafts or got edited out. So this goal has been a huge success!

Game Design

I got really into making silly games in Scratch with my kid and for my fandom friends in the fall, so this was a huge winner.

I still want to work in some less kid-oriented frameworks, but I’ve actually been really pleased with the amount of stuff they packed into Scratch. It’s been fun to look at the stupid mobile games and stuff my kid sees streamers play and think “Hey, we could make that in Scratch” so I think we’ll have some more fun prototyping silly ideas about how to make games better.

Also, I love that kiddo and I have been having real conversations about game design and fun and difficulty curves and art assets and stuff. I may need to see about joining some game design oriented communities the way I’ve been enjoying fandom communities if I want to turn this from a casual sometimes thing to a regular activity in my life, but for now kid and I are having a good time together. So I declare this goal a success!

Conclusions

Honestly, I think these weren’t the best goals: obviously the stash thing didn’t work out, and I think maybe revisiting old goals and doing “something new” were both a bit too open-ended and looking through that big list of previous years goals wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be. That’s probably because this was a year of burnout so I could have used more direction from my past self (but I was already very burned out last year when I was putting these goals together, so it is what it is). I got a lot out of the 2025 goals in the end, but it was a bit more of a struggle than fiber goals have been for me in previous years. Of course, everything has been a bit of a struggle this year so maybe the goals aren’t to blame.

For my personal goals tracking, I switched to re-writing the goals in my monthly journal spreads, then recording one or two things I planned to do to fill them, or added things after when I wrapped up the month. It made writing these wrap-up posts a lot easier! I think it helped me to have them where I was checking off completed projects so I saw them when I was deciding what to work on next, too. One of the things I enjoy about using a blank journal rather than one with preset pages is that I can slowly tweak these things as I find different things I need to record or keep in the front of my mind.

I still love the idea of fiber goals, but I think it’s fair to say that I’m stretching out from fiber right now and that’s unlikely to change in 2026. So I’m going to keep the idea of “have goals for things that bring you joy” going, but switch to calling them “Creative goals” for next year. Stay tuned tomorrow for what those goals will be!

Day 5: Marie Rose. Kind of an orange-brown that shows a bit of black at the edge of the bigger swatches. I wondered why it was names “rose” when at best it might be a really desiccated old rose petal colour, but apparently it’s named after a type of sauce and not after the plant. I actually don’t have anything particularly close to this colour and it’s a nice uncomplicated standard ink so it’ll definitely get used even though it’s a colour I might never have thought to buy.

Day 6: Fir & Fog. Beautiful blue-leaning green with iridescent shimmer. It makes me think more of spruce than fir trees but I don’t think most people think that deeply about their evergreens. Love it. I’d probably get this even without the shimmer; it’s a really nice colour. Plus the name really makes me feel like Pacific Northwest winter, where I see the big Douglas Firs looming out of the fog many mornings.

Day 7: Blush. Pink. This one goes on the page looking like fresh nosebleed (look, I was one of those kids and I’m very familiar with what a drop of fresh blood looks like on the page) but it dries pleasantly into a red-leaning pink. I think the closest colour I have is Pilot Iroshuziku Momiji which is more pink and less red. I’ve been struggling to use Momiji in palettes because it’s a bit too bright, so I think the slightly more muted feeling Blush is going to fit in really well.

Day 8: Dream Catcher. There is so much pink sheen that you can barely see the base colour, but it is actually blue. This is fun but *very* similar to last year’s Cosmic Glow, so even though it’s lovely it maybe wasn’t quite as exciting as it would have been if I didn’t have last year’s colour. I had to really stare at them together to see that Dream Catcher’s base blue is subtly more greenish than Cosmic Glow’s (but it’s not as far over as Vibe, also in last year’s inkvent). I have a few other similar blue-with-pink-sheen inks but none of them have as much sheen as these so they feel pretty different.

Even though Dream Catcher is nearly a dupe and a colour family that’s already over-represented in my collection, these are all very pretty and will definitely get used. If I had to guess, Blush is the one that’ll get used most often because I have wanted a different pink for a while, but I’m really in love with the spruce green of Fir & Fog plus the name will make me think of the pacific northwest winter.

Day 1: Celestial Skies. Lovely lightly teal-leaning blue with a touch of red sheen and gold shimmer. This was amazing in the dip pen — lots of shimmer and the sheen around every letter looks spectacular. If it looks half as good in a regular pen this will be a treat.

Day 2: Energy: purple with green sheen. Looks cooler in the swatch than in regular writing but I really like the underlying purple and don’t mind the sheen but I wish it was a little less intense so you could see more of the purple through it. Since the dip pen tends to be wetter and thus showcase more sheen, I may like this one a lot better in a regular pen. But it’ll be usable either way.

Day 3: Carousel. Red with a very tiny bit of gold sheen that makes it look like enamel paint. I really love it. This one is listed as a pigment ink. I didn’t think to test how waterproof it was but it was definitely harder to clean off my tools. I’ve been looking for a “correction pen red” kind of colour so I’m pretty delighted to have this one even if I may need to be careful to put it only in pens I can clean easily.

Day 4: Smoky Tobacco. Brown with a tobacco scent. I saw someone describe this as smelling like cancer. It definitely made my nose unhappy when I had the bottle open for a bit, so I’m probably minorly allergic to this, or it smells enough of tobacco that it’s brining back bad memories of all the second hand smoke one used to inhale in restaurants and bars before cigarette bans started to happen. Thankfully the smell doesn’t seem to linger on the page and once I realized my nose was running and closed the bottle I was able to write with it okay so it could just be that there’s a bit more alcohol in there than usual and it won’t be an issue in practice. It’s a nice enough brown with a bit of a black sheen on the iroful paper (not pictured, my swatches on Rhodia) and I don’t have anything particularly similar, but we’ll see if the smell is a dealbreaker in practice.

I think of these four, Celestial Skies will be the first one to go into a pen and I might not even wait until the end of the month.

Ink

No ink palette for this month — I’m writing half of my journal entries with the day’s Inkvent ink using my dip pen with the reservoir and finishing them out with whatever pens I still have inked. I might swap inks eventually but there’s basically no colour scheme going on here.

I am making swatches of each ink as I go, so I’ll probably start posting those in groups or something if things have really settled down enough to allow for that.

Stickers:

• Christmas bears by Kawaiihentaii
• Holiday squirrels by Nettle & Twig
• Shiny snowflakes don’t list an artist, just stickii.

Other Stuff

It’s been a rough month and we’re only a few days in, but I’m still working on holiday knitting and haven’t started the advent-style knitting I had planned because emergencies took precedence over winding yarn. The house is starting to look like we’re prepping for a move with boxes starting to pile up, and kid’s got a big countdown chain to help him visualize how many days before the end of school I’ve got a cough at the moment that has kept me out of choir, which honestly is a bit of a blessing because it’s one less thing to worry about. But we’re surviving and we were lucky enough to have a friend visiting when the worst went down, so I’m feeling tired but supported and hopeful that we’re making our way through it all.

Stickers

• Fountain Pen ghost cats by Yudoart (from stickii halloween last year)
• Witchy sticker sheet by November Rush (from stickii halloween last year)
• MU “print on stickers” (transfers, really)
• Droplets sheet by Starriesena (also from stickii)

Pens and Ink

• Pelikan Pura <b> with Diamine Baltic Breeze (blue with copper? sparkle)
• Pilot Metropolitan <cm> with Diamine Twilight (dark grey)
• Monteverde Ritma <flex> with Van Dieman’s Last Light (purple-blue)
• Pilot E95S <m> with Sailor Mayo Asagiri (pink)

The Van Dieman’s Last Light is a new sample I picked up from their line of two-tone inks. I actually really like the way this ink works other than the fact that I keep thinking it’s too light to read while I’m writing but it does dry darker as so many purple-ish inks do. It’s especially nice in this particular flex nib, which basically lets you pour out more ink with bit of extra pressure, and a bit more ink in this case gets more of the dual colour effect.

Using the Metropolitan right after using the Maple pen last month has cemented that the Metropolitan is significantly easier on my hands, so my ranking continues to stand.

Thoughts on last month’s selections

Some thoughts on what worked and what didn’t from last month. The architect nib in that maple pen is very fun to use but definitely tires my hands out. Not sure if that’s primarily due to the nib or it’s also the heavier and larger pen. It worked really well with Southwest Sunset except that I’d forgotten that this particular ink leaves little dots that take forever to dry, so I smeared it a few times. I had this trouble with the other noodler’s ink I had as well, and wound up giving the rest of that sample away. I like the colours of Southwest Sunset enough that I’m keeping my last tiny bit of sample but I’ll try to remember that it’s kind of annoying to use even if the shading is super pretty.

The combo of Wearingeul Frankenstein and my TWSBI Eco worked, but it was clear that all the shimmer was getting stuck in the feed and very little made it to the page, so next time that ink goes in the Pelikan to see if I can get a better effect. It is really nice without the shimmer, though, so not too sad.

Using KWZ All that Glitters Firecracker reminded me how much I enjoy their easy to use shimmers that work in all my pens. Since they’re only $10 per 30ml bottle, I just went ahead and bought the two colours I didn’t have. I don’t think they’re as pretty as the two I bought first, but I think I’ll enjoy using them anyhow!

The Pelikan Pura made Diamine Pine Needle work much better than last time I used it. Very happy with how much the Pura improves my ink collection!

The Leuchtturm1917 is working well. The paper definitely is a bit thinner so I found myself rearranging inks so the dark purple Frankenstein was mostly used on the left hand page and I wasn’t writing on something with seriously visible ghosting. I don’t find it too disruptive but it’s there and I notice and think about it regularly. It’s been nice enough for writing, though — not too slow to dry or anything. I do really love the pre-numbered pages and the way the top and bottom have wider margins, though, so the layout is great. I think my perfect notebook would be this dot grid page layout with thicker paper in a smaller page count, but I’ve still got a small collection of notebooks to try so maybe I’ll find something I enjoy even more.

Pen collection changes

I passed 3 pens on to a friend this month. From left to right:

Jinhao 100 <fude>: This one has to be held at a steep angle for the width of line I want, which made it not super useful for regular use since my normal writing angle produced very thick lines. It’s probably tuned for calligraphy? It would have been nice for making cards or something, but I seldom do that. It’s a pretty pen but it really wasn’t working for me, and I have a few other fudes in my collection. My friend is a lefty and it worked better for her, so off it goes.

Noodler’s Creaper <Flex>: This is actually the only fountain pen I’ve ever had which I hated the feel of the pen body rather than the nib. It constantly gave me the vibe of one of those cheap conference giveaway pens that didn’t quite fit together right. No idea why, it wasn’t actually loose, maybe it was something about the shape. But it’s been sitting in a cup because I don’t want to use it, so I’m glad to pass it along where it might get used!

Hongdian M1 <ef>: The extra fine nib in this felt like I was writing with a toothpick, scratchy and too small. Actually, I think I’ve painted with toothpicks that I liked better than this. I’m not a huge extra fine fan, but the other ones I have don’t feel as bad as this one did to me. Could have replaced the nib but I decided it was better to give it away.

I’d intended to reduce my pen collection by not replacing these, but then Fountain Pen Day sales happened and I picked up a couple of cheaper pens on my wish list. A paragon of restraint I am not, this month. Which is fine, my unemployment can cover a few pens and inks if a bit of retail therapy is helping me survive a month of solo parenting and all the preparation for an international move and dealing with job interview stuff. I’m still feeling less burned out as a whole, but the past few weeks have been A Lot.

Countdown time

In other related news: I wound up buying both the Stickii Advent and the Diamine Inkvent calendar.

The stickers were an easy choice: I’ve used most of last year’s, and with my regular usage at around 2.5 sheets per month a December countdown isn’t so many stickers that it’s going to overwhelm me for the year. Unlike the halloween collection, these aren’t all wintery so I used last year’s year-round easily. I love picking out stickers and matching inks every month, and the stickii ones are a bit thinner, smaller and more convenient for journal use than some of the others I get from individual artists. I’d probably like their subscription club too but that one is more stickers than I use per month so this fits my life better plus I get a cute binder to store my sheets in. I use last year’s a lot.

The inkvent calendar was a harder choice: I use maybe 2ml of ink in the average month, so I strongly debated just making myself a 12-sample pack to enjoy over the holidays which would match up better with my ink usage. But then I kind of overwhelmed myself trying to pick 12 colours and the ones I chose kept going out of stock and I realized I wasn’t actually having that much fun with that plan. So in the end I decided to just get the Inkvent set and stop fussing over picking things. It’s “too much ink” but I really loved the experience last year and the excuse to swatch and use a new ink every day. And I know I won’t be sad about having more colours to use in my monthly palettes, since I know I sometimes struggle with finding something to match my chosen stickers. In hindsight, I should have just planned to trade ink samples with my friend and use those, but I didn’t think to do an ink swap until nearly a month after I ordered the inkvent calendar. Whoops.

Not sure how I feel about the sparkle-sheen gimmick for Inkvent but now that I’ve got the Pelican pens that seem able to take advantage of my shimmer inks, I’m sure they’ll get used.

Also, it’s got me thinking about painting with fountain pen inks as a way to enjoy them more. I’ve been doing a bunch of watercolour painting by going through lessons in various books I’ve gotten from the library, and it’s been really pleasant and I’m starting to get some paintings I’m proud of even if they’re just duplicating the exercises. Inks are more complicated pigments than I’m used to using but I can learn and experiment. So ink painting might go on next year’s “fiber goals” though it’s a little less fiber-y.

Speaking of fiber, I skipped out on bigger yarn advents but did get the 8 day Chanukah set from ChemKnits again because I love supporting her videos and 8 minis isn’t too much yarn. I haven’t always knit with these right away because I’m usually doing advent stuff that starts earlier in the month, but since this will be among the yarns I have with me when I get on the plane in December, it makes sense to plan some socks in January or something.

I have to actually plan a few months of projects in advance so I have the right yarns and tools on hand during the move. I usually do have rough plans of what I want to knit next, but it’s definitely different when almost all my yarn and half my tools will be packed and on a truck! So far I’ve got a half formed plan to do Grand Opening with a mini set from my stash, but I’ll figure out more soon!

Journal Stuff

My Clairefontaine Triomphe journal is a few pages from done so it’s getting retired this month. (In theory I’ll use the last pages for ink swatching.) I started it in April 2025 so it lasted 6 months. I liked the blank paper ok but didn’t do as much drawing in it as I hoped. Most of the reason was that I got really into writing stories instead so visual art fell by the wayside, and I’m okay with that.

October I’ll be starting a Leuchtturm1917 softcover book from my collection of paper brands I haven’t tried yet. This one reminds me a lot of my beloved Pentalic notebooks that I used to carry everywhere — slightly more rigid cover, big pocket in the back. I’ve heard mixed reviews on the fountain pen experience but I’ve tested my current set of pens in it (including my two broad nibs both of which are currently inked) and while there’s *definitely* ghosting I don’t think it’s going to be a dealbreaker for me. At my current rate of writing this should last around 9 months which is good because I’m moving and there’s a non-zero chance that my other stationary supplies will wind up hard to find for a while, so I didn’t want to use one of the smaller 3-month sized notebooks this time and be scrambling for a new notebook at a time when my office might be still packed or even on a moving truck.

In September, I picked up a Lochby A5 Field Folio. I’d been eyeing it for a while but couldn’t tell if it would work for me, and finally decided the only way I would know was to try it out. So far it’s going great! This replaces both my green notebook cover and the ghost whale zipper pouch: it keeps my calendar and journal notebooks together and stops them from getting too beaten up when I carry them around in my knitting bag all day. It’s got a more rigid structure so I can write more easily when I don’t have a flat surface (honestly, I rarely write at a desk). And it’s got significantly better pockets for the size of sticker sheets I have (I think the stickii ones are A6). I like that they thought to make the pen pocket be usable even with the notebooks open, although since I keep a pen case and have multiple writing tools going, I only sometimes use it. I’ve had the Field Folio a couple of weeks and things are going great; we’ll see if it starts to feel too heavy once I’ve got the thicker Leuchtturm notebook in there.

Stickers & Stamps

All of these are from last year’s stickii halloween countdown. I was tempted to get the new one this year but clearly I have enough halloween stickers for the moment and didn’t need more!

• trick or treat kitties from Tiny Yume
• More costumed kitties from Moon Attic
• Halloween tickets from Asakodraws
• Icon squares from Laurelmaeart

Got some black/gold washi tape to go with it, and I also picked up a couple Pilot FriXion stamps to track when I floss my teeth and when I practice singing. It’s taken a bit to get used to how lightly they should be pressed to look their best, but I like them! I have a few others in different colours that I’m not using for specific tracking at the moment, too.

Fountain Pens & Inks

• KWZ All That Glitters Firecracker (red-orange with gold shimmer) paired with a Kaweco Sport <b>
• Wearingeul Mary Shelly Frankenstein (purple) paired with a glow in the dark green TWSBI Eco <1.1 stub>
• Noodler’s Southwest Sunset (orange) paired with a Hongdian maple leaf pen <long blade>
• Diamine Pine Needle (green with shimmer) paired with a Pelikan Pura <b>

Trying to make a dent in my ink samples. That Noodler’s sample comes from before I learned more about the company so I won’t be picking up a full sized bottle once it’s done even though the colour is nice. The Wearingeul sample honestly didn’t wow me that much when I used it last year so it’s unlikely to get re-bought either but maybe I’ll like it more this year in a different pen? I think it’s just too dark for my tastes. Unlikely that I finish either this month unless I start using them for painting. (That isn’t actually too far fetched; I’ve been practising watercolour painting techniques from library books!) The Firecracker / Kaweco sport was already inked as kid entertainment for last weekend’s trip.

You might note that this is a rare time when my Pilot E95S isn’t in the line-up: it’s because it’s got a few drops of Aurora Borealis left in it and I’m going to use them up before cleaning and re-inking it.

Current Top Pens (S tier, Pokemon style)

1. Pilot E95S <medium> – My most expensive pen and only gold nibbed one. It gets an emotional bonus for being a birthady gift from my husband. I like the odd pockiet pen shape and it has a consistently lovely writing experience although I am afraid to put sparkle inks in it thanks to my experience with my other pilot pens. I don’t think it’s going to inspire me to upgrade to gold nibs everywhere but I’m very happy to have one for the experience.
2. Pelikan Pura <broad> – SPARKLE PEN! This is my go-to shimmer ink pen now and I’ve only had it a few weeks so it feels a bit weird to put it here but I love it so much. Beautiful turquoise with a Y/snowflake pattern that reminds me of quilts but most importantly I like the grip more than the one on the Twist.
3. Pilot Metropolitan <CM> – I really like the way my writing looks with their cursive italic nib, which is smaller than my other stub pens. If I could get a few more stubs at this width I would, it’s a perfect balance of fun to write with but usable even in smaller notebook spacings. I’ve seen it marked as a 1mm vs a 1.1stub but I think it’s more like a .7 in practice? This was one of the first pens I bought (alongside a TWSBI eco) and I still love it. Turns out I’m a big fan of the shiny metal look. Often when not in use this one still sits in front of my computer to look pretty (the rest are in a pen cup nearby when not in use). I still kind of want a bunch of the other colours in the retro pop line.
4. TWSBI Eco glow green <medium, stub> – It glows in the dark, which makes it better than my other two TWSBI pens. This is one that sits on my nightstand so I can watch it glow when not in active use. It’s really taught me that it’s worth being finicky about getting a colour I like, since it’s functionally the same as my other TWSBI pens but I just love it more. I bought this with a medium nib but am swapping in a stub from my other eco.
5. Platinum Preppy Wa Koi pattern <fine> – My todo list pen. I like the texture of the pattern under my fingers and the fact that the cap seals so well that I don’t have to worry much about it drying out. I don’t really like fine nibs in general but this one is nice and sometimes I want to write very tiny things in the flip book I use for daily todos.

Except for the Pura (which is very new) these are basically the pens I reach for most often. The Preppy and the Pilot E95S are almost constantly inked, the others rotate in regularly as I’m trying different inks and experimenting with other pens. I usually have 3-6 journal pens and 2 todo list pens inked and if I don’t rotate I’d basically never use any other pens.

A tier pens (as in, second rank)

These pens are good and write well but basically they aren’t as pretty so they don’t get used as often. These are the ones that sometimes go in my purse or on trips with me because I like the writing experience but I won’t be as sad if I lose one.

• All the “less pretty” versions of what I have in my favourite pen list. So that’s my other TWSBIs (an ECO-T and a Swipe), my Pilot Kakuno and Varsity, my other Platinum Preppy. These all write well and consistently and get used sometimes but I’m gonna reach for the prettier one most times. I will give a shout out to the TWSBI Swipe which has a smaller converter instead of a piston so it gets used more often than the ECO when I’m using up ink samples.
• Ooly Duo <fine?> – These are todo list pens that I impulse bought at the book store. They are refillable on the fountain pen side, not sure about the highlighter side. Great for todo lists, I like the colour, and the one I opened months ago is still going strong with no sign of drying out. Honestly, I’d recommend these to people looking for a fun starter fountain pen for planner use.
• Jinhao Shark Pen <fine> – Nice todo list pen or purse pen. The shark look makes it especially good as kid distraction purse pen.
• Kaweco sport (I have 2 bodies and and 3 nibs in M, B and stub) – I like these and I particularly like how easy it is to clean them and swap nibs, and the very small converters use about a month’s worth of ink at my current usage, so that’s nice. They get pulled out for travel and rotated in as purse pens because of their size.
• Hongdian maple leaf pen <architect> – This is a lovely pen but it mostly loses out to the Pilot Metropolitan because I like it a bit better and they have a similar niche. I should probably get this pen into rotation more; it’s barely been used since I bought it.

B Tier pens

These pens are ones I like but have things that irritate me. They get rotated in for specific purposes but tend to get rotated out early because I’m tired of using them.

• Pelikan Twist <medium> – Fantastic sparkle ink pen, but the twisted triangular grip isn’t a good ergonomic fit for me so I actually use this with a gel wrap over the grip if I’m going to write for a while. I did finally have a sparkle get stuck in it but it recovered without needing a full nib cleaning. Still significantly better than my experience with the same inks in my TWSBI or Kaweco pens.
• Endless Phantom retractable <fude, medium> – Dries out too fast for my regular use. I need a pen that can stay wet for 4 days because I rotate between journal colours, it only consistently stays wet for 2. I may yet find a use for this one because I like the fude nib I got with it, and I don’t have another fude I like except on my dip pen. May just come out on months when I have 2 colours going, or I may accept that it should move down into the forgotten tier.
• Monteverde Ritma <flex> – This pen is so beautiful and I love the feel of the magnetic cap, but it is SO HEAVY. But it’s really pretty and while I know it’s not a “true” flex nib I really like the way this one can lay down extra ink so you can have fun with sheen and I’ve had some luck with shimmer too. I should probably rotate this one in a bit more often now that I’ve got a better idea of what inks suit it.
• Nahvalur Original Plus <stub> – Good for travel, but this vacuum filler has such a large ink tank that I get tired of the ink long before I finish it even on a lazy non-full fill. Also, I don’t know if it’s a vacuum filler thing but it seems to dry up a bit mid-writing no matter how open I have things so I have to shake a bubble out of the way every once in a while.

Everything Else

And then there’s… everything else. Cheap pens that broke, things with fine/extra fine nibs that I hated (which is basically F/EF nib except the Preppy and the Ooly pens listed above). Most of these I should just give away, although there’s a couple in there that I haven’t really given a fair shake to because they didn’t wow me after one month (e.g. I should probably give the Conklin Durograph I got on super sale another go, I think it was a bad ink combo that landed it here).

Things I’ve learned about my fountain pen preferences

Preferred filling system: Converter. I usually have a few pens going for journal use and use less than 1ml of ink in each pen, so small converters are pretty great for me in terms of switching most of a palette of inks monthly. I don’t have any filling system I hate, though the jury is still out on the vacuum filler.

Preferred nib: I like having a variety in my journal pens so I can sometimes write fast with an easy medium nib and sometimes take my time with a stub. Turns out I like broad and should probably try a double broad. I hate almost every extra fine nib or fine nib I’ve tried, and I now have enough todo list pens, so I should probably never buy another F or EF unless it’s something really special.

Preferred size: I really love pocket pens and smaller pens, probably because I have small hands. I haven’t actually had ergonomic issues writing with bigger ones other than maybe my stupidly heavy Ritma but I definitely find myself wanting to go for smaller and lighter.

Preferred materials: I really love shiny coloured metal. Anodized aluminum, I guess? I thought for sure I’d be more into the sparkly resins since that’s more like my taste in jewellery, and don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty, but I really love the bold colourful metallic pens. Might be partially because resins and whatnot are a bit heavier? Knowing this has helped me avoid buying those fancy benu pens.

Preferred inks: I like a variety, and prefer saturated colours with less black and blue. I need less shimmer and more shading inks in my collection at the moment, I think, and I’d like to finish a few more samples so I have space for new ones in the box I use to organize them (I could get a second box but I probably shouldn’t). I really like smaller size bottles and samples so I can have more variety, so a lot of my preferred inks are just because they come in 30ml or smaller sizes.

Preferred Notebooks: A5 size, smaller softcovers. Ideal size is probably under 100 pages. I’m waffling on dot grid vs blank but probably one of those. I didn’t love the more coated iroful paper for journal writing (though it was delightful for playing with inks) but everything else I’ve tried has been good. I’m currently enjoying the Clairefontaine Triomphe notebook I’ve got going. I do wish more notebooks came pre-numbered because I don’t love writing numbers myself but it’s a minor issue. I’ve given up on indexing since it turned out to be minimally useful and not fun for me, but I use the page numbers to estimate how long I have left in a given book and see if I’m writing a lot more or less than usual. I was previously more picky about the quality of the notebook cover itself because it impacted how easy it was to write in weird places (I don’t often use a table) but now that I have a slipcover and writing boards that’s been not such a big deal.

Special editions: I’ve been trying to avoid getting really into the “collecting” part of fountain pens as a hobby, but looking at my top pens, it’s clear that “pretty” factors a lot into what I love the most, especially in cases where I have similar pens. So it’s good to know that it’s worth waiting for my favourite colour to come into stock or occasionally to splurge on a special edition if that’s the one calling my name. Which isn’t a surprise since one of my favourite scientific results is the “pretty things are more usable even across cultures” one but it’s nice to put it in action for myself.

We’ll see how I feel about all these preferences in a year or two, but that’s where I’m at right now!

I was reminded of this today while chatting with some fanfic people and decided it was time to try to fix it.

Step 1: install an emoji font on the device.

Kobo has a nice tutorial for this and it’s pretty straightforwards BUT it turns out that the default emoji font on my laptop (running fedora) is the Google Noto Color Emoji font which doesn’t work on my device. Won’t even show up as a font after I put it on the device.

Step 2: Find the right emoji font that actually works.

Thankfully, there exists a b&w version of this font and it’s free to download. I grabbed the “regular” one out of the zip file and installed it. Bam! Font exists on device.

Step 3: Set the font in the document

In theory, my Kobo has an option to add in “supplemental fonts” so it’ll try those if the main font doesn’t have the necessary characters. But that didn’t work at all, possibly because the font thinks it has the character and is displaying a blank in the epub file I tested? I really don’t know why except that it didn’t work.

Setting the emoji font as the main font for the document does work, though, and the emoji displays just fine. It’s… not a great font, though. Lots of giant spaces between words.

Step 4: ???

The internet has a bunch of random speculation like “epubs only support 1 font” (which seems unlikely but not actually impossible) so it might be best to merge the emoji into a font I actually like for reading.

It’s also possible that I could set up some automatic styling of my epubs in calibre that would make the fonts work better. Some people seemed to have ideas about that but a lot of it included styling each emoji and while I’m sure I can write a perl script for it I’m not convinced that’s the best choice. And, again, it requires me to know that there’s emoji in an epub before I transfer it to my device, which I don’t always know when I buy a book or grab a fanfic. I guess I could build a whole workflow to look for them, but it seems unlikely that’s what everyone else is doing? Surely I am not the only person who reads reasonably modern epubs with chat sections in them?

For now, I have the font on my device and can flip over to it to see if I can see an emoji if I think one is missing, then flip back when reading with weird spacing irritates me. Not the worst, since often I can tell when the narrative has a chat/texting section that might include emoji. But that doesn’t really help when it’s not obvious from context.

So… Not sure what my next step it, but that’s where I’m at and I’m going to give up and make some lunch. If anyone has found a good fix for this, I’d love to know!

Here’s this month’s stationary supplies:

Stickers

• household stuff sheet from Eggtart Studio (via stickii; I think this was an advent sheet)
• day to day icons sheet from Neko Mori Arts (via stickii, I think I bought this one specifically because I needed more habit stickers. Currently tracking writing days with these!)
• Calendar from Mossy Pine (as usual; I got a whole year’s worth!)

These were the intersection of being a little bit back to school-ish and also having the right colour vibe to go with the inks I wanted.

Paper Products

• Campus Diary free monthly calendar (new)
• Clairfontaine Triomphe blank notebook (going since April 2025)
• Koyuko campus notebook cover

I already talked about my new calendar for the year, a Campus free monthly diary. It worked great with the fountain pen I used for numbers in September so I’m pretty happy with it so far, and I’ve got it slotted into the green cover (pictured above) on the opposite site of my current journal. Because they’re slotted in opposite sides rather than using strings or clips in the middle, there’s a bit of a gap in the centre. I was worried this would be a problem for writing but so far it seems to be fine. I’ll try some ink testing with dip pens on the back pages when I next do swatching.

Fountain Pens and Inks

• Pilot Elite E95S <m> – Diamine Aurora Borealis (dark teal, carry over from last month)
• Pelikan Pura <b> – Diamine Snow Globe (blue with blue shimmer)
• Pelikan Twist <m> – Diamine Winterberry (red with red shimmer)

The theme of this month is “omg I finally have pens that work with shimmer ink“. I loved these colours in the Inkvent 2024 calendar but was worried I woudln’t be able to use them.

Since my blog post about the Pelikan Twist I managed to find someone selling the particular model of Pelikan Pura that I’d fallen for with the broad nib I wanted at a sale price, so I decided to jump on it even though I’m unemployed and should probably not be buying $100 pens. But I *love* this pen as much as I hoped I would and it fills a gap in my collection so I don’t feel like I made the wrong choice. The Pelikan Pura anniversary design with the little Y geometric snowflake shape and the pretty teal colour is fantastic, and obviously I’m very excited about having a feed that doesn’t clog up with sparkle. It has a round grip so no issues with that (the way there were with the Twist’s odd triangular grip). I expect this pen will be inked almost constantly since it will likely be my sparkle pen going fowards, and I have a lot of sparkle inks from Inkvent to use. Honestly, this pen jumped immediately into second place in my collection (behind my beloved Pilot Elite).

After this month, the Twist will probably go back to being relegated as a sometimes pen because of the annoying triangle pen, although I’ve been playing with a coil grip thing on it that helps a bit and we’ll see how I feel about it after a month of use.

Last year’s calendar was a Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar. I love the idea of the system of inexpensive refill notebooks and accessories in a planner cover that stays with you, but I wasn’t sure the slimmer form factor was going to work for me.

Overall, I thought it was a great little calendar. I liked the textured cardstock cover, and I liked the whole setup even more when I picked up the zippered pouch that I have attached to the back cover and use for stickers.

I particularly liked this format when travelling this summer, when I decided to use the blank back pages I hadn’t used for testing pens as the place for travel journal entries rather than dragging my regular A5 journal around with me. The tall-thin format is pleasantly easy to pull out of a bag.

But when I’m *not* out of the house (which is most of the time) the calendar is just a little small. I use my monthly calendars for tracking a bunch of things, and while some days there’s enough space, that’s not true of all days when I have more stuff I want to record. I’ve also found that a lot of my favourite “small” stickers that I use as habit trackers take up a lot of space. (The dogs below were marking days that I’d spent time writing.)

Since I already use an A5 notebook for my journal, I decided I might as well match it for the calendar this year. Honestly I wanted to do that last year but a lot of the A5 options are Monday start and I thought that might be annoying when Sunday start is the more common format around here. The Traveler’s refill lets you fill in your own days of week. But this year I’m just gonna lean into Monday start. I conceptually like it better so I’ve changed my phone and stuff and we’ll see if I start having off-by-one errors.

So my new calendar for the 2025-2026 school year is a KOKUYO Campus Diary Free Schedule monthly calendar. I should note that although this is a blank calendar, the year overview pages are Jan-Dec still so … I dunno, I guess I could cover the labels or just start in the middle, but I apparently barely used those overview pages last year so I’m guessing it’ll just remain blank or I’ll doodle on it or something. While the book itself is clearly bigger, the layout is such that each day’s square is a bit shorter but wider.

Here’s some size comparisons:

I did some measuring too:

• Traveler’s Calendar: 27mm wide by 33mm tall (total 891mm squared)
• Campus calendar: 34mm wide by 31mm tall (total 1054mm squared)

So the Campus notebook squares are about 18% bigger, I guess. I don’t know yet if that’ll be enough, but I’m unlikely to start carrying around anything bigger than an A5 notebook so if this doesn’t work out I’ll likely have switch to a weekly planner for at least some of my tracking. My calendar seldom leaves the house but I carry it from room to room and into the backyard in my knitting bag, and A5 is my preferred size for that.

The Campus notebook is cheap enough that it won’t be a tragedy if I bail on it part way through the year. It looks like I paid $5.50 for the Campus one and $11 for the Traveler’s one, so it’s half the cost but also neither of them is exactly going to break the bank. And yes, I did intentionally buy this earlier in the year to help me resist getting too curious about fall planner launches.

The cover is considerably less nice (thin enough that I will need a flat surface or pencil board to write in this, no pleasant texture) but I have a cover for A5 notebooks that should compensate for the thin cover, and I already own several pencil boards that I use with my current journal, so neither of those is deal breakers at this moment.

I’m also curious to see how I like the Campus paper. It’s supposedly decent enough for fountain pens, and although I only use those for date numbers currently, I’ll be using the pages in the back of the calendar for ink testing. I’m curious to see how I like it, mostly for the fun of testing a different paper. Although they do have a lot of other cute paper products geared at students that are quite reasonably priced, and I’m never sad to have options.

Some things that did work well this year:

• Thin washi tape for marking longer blocks of vacation and events. I love the way it looks even if it takes up a few precious mm of space.
• Sticker “rewards” for habits. I’m amused by how much more rewarding these are than drawing tracking icons.
• Switching to pencil for calendar writing. I tried pen for a while but didn’t love it.
• Getting a pen shaped eraser so it fits in my pencil case better.
• Getting a pencil board and using it also as a bookmark so my calendar always opened to the right page.
• The zipper pouch for stickers.

I may keep the zipper pouch for stickers even though it won’t be stuck on a notebook any more (I mean, I could, but I’m going to try having both A5 notebooks in a single cover so it would be kind of in the way).

I haven’t actually written in the new calendar yet (I’ll be setting it up on labour day and I’m writing this the night before it posts) but I’m excited to try it out!

I own a few of the cheaper pens that people said worked for them, and the one that had been giving me the least trouble had been the TWSBI Swipe. But even “least trouble” meant that I could use the pen, but it felt like it was getting a shimmer particle stuck somewhere on the regular, so I’d have skipping and low ink flow and the whole thing felt scratchy and annoying to use. You can kind of see it in my journal writing:

Note that this ink *is* shimmery but I couldn’t get an angle of light that showed the paper dents and the shimmer at the same time so you’re not seeing much of it in these writing samples. This is on white Clairfontaine paper in my current journal.

Someone on mastodon (sorry, I forget who but it might have been @paradoxmo?) mentioned that they liked Pelikan for shimmer inks, but the ones they used were pretty pricey. But I had a Pelikan Twist I’d bought ages ago. So I wanted to know would the feed take shimmer as well as their more expensive pens? I can’t answer that because I don’t have any of those, but I can tell you that it’s worlds better than the TWSBI Swipe, or any of the other pens I’d gotten in search of the One True Shimmer Pen for my collection.

I don’t know if the photos convey how different the writing experience is between these two pens. The TWSBI Swipe feels most often like I’m writing with a mechanical pencil: lots of feedback, very scratchy. It also tends to get finicky about angles. It’s not consistent: I think it’s happening when a particle gets stuck somewhere, so it’ll write fine for a word and then just choke. But basically it works beautifully for a day or two and then it feels like it’s running out of ink half the time.

The Pelikan Twist on the other hand, writes like, well, a fountain pen, even with the same shimmer ink. It’s smooth and the ink flows consistently. I can leave the pen for a few days without having to run the nib under the tap to get it going again. It is everything I wanted out of the writing experience but had never been able to achieve when using shimmer inks in any pen.

I’m really pleased, but also confused: lots of people love the TWSBI pens for shimmer, and I have 3 of them all of which eventually did the same half-clog thing. None of my other pens fared better, including the Wing Sung 698 I’d bought especially for this purpose. (To be fair, that one had other problems so I may have just gotten a bad one.) I still don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or if I’m just significantly more picky about my writing experience. The former is entirely possible, the latter seems unlikely given how fountain pen users are. I am rolling the pen periodically to keep the shimmer moving as I write, and making sure the ink bottle is shaken so the shimmer is suspended in the ink before I fill the pen.

For all that I now love it, the Pelikan Twist is a weird pen. I think it cost me about $20 and only came in medium (which is fine, I like medium). I had some trouble finding a converter that actually fit it. The internet said it should fit a standard international converter but nothing I had on hand worked; thankfully the fine folk at Jetpens have more precise recommendations so I picked up something from them and it’s great. (I could also hae refilled the cartridge that came with it, but I like converters better.) I will say that the plastic on my Twist is already kind of dinged up (if you look closely in the photos you can see some grey areas), probably from when I carried my pens around in a pencil case that didn’t keep them separated.

Unfortunately, the reason this pen never made it into regular rotation when I bought it to try many months ago (because it looked weird and was on sale) is that I don’t love the feel of the triangle grip. It’s not unbearable, just slightly off from what I find most comfortable. This got it most often relegated to “to do list pen” for months while I used up the cartridge, then got it forgotten in the pen cup until my shimmer problems made me pull it out.

But even *with* a grip that doesn’t perfectly suit me, it’s worlds better with shimmer ink than any other pen I own, and I’m really happy because this means the Diamine Inkvent inks I’d been struggling to use now have a dedicated pen and will be coming out significantly more often than they would have if I’d had to use a dip pen with them.

I should note that it’s not *all* shimmer inks that give me these headaches. I’ve been having a delightful time with the KWZ All That Glitters inks in pretty much any pen I try. But my ink collection is very small so it’s pretty dominated by last year’s Inkvent calendar at the moment. Still, the problem was bad enough that I’d been refusing to buy other shimmer inks and had taken the Diamine inkvent 2025 calendar off my plans for this year because I didn’t want to pile up more inks I could barely use.

Anyhow, I’m very happy with discovering that even this cheap Pelikan pen has a feed that takes shimmer better than anything else I own! But I will admit that it made me go look at other Pelikan pens and of course I feel in love with one that’s considerably more expensive and limited edition to boot. I can’t really *blame* companies for making money and no one manufactures exactly the same thing forever, but this hobby can be a bit much with the special editions to keep you buying. Ugh!

In my previous post about fiber goals I’d claimed not to have done anything new in July, but I forgot I made a book nook! It’s not apparent from the photo but it’s sized to fit on a bookshelf.

This was a kit I bought online a year or two ago. I did decided some of the pieces needed extra glue because the friction fits were not sufficient. But other than that, it was pretty simple and relaxing to put together over a couple of days.

Not going to be a new hobby since this is the only kit I bought for myself, but it was nice to do something different!

1. Revisit Old Goals
2. Try Something New
3. Something Stash Something
4. Game Design

We’re a bit more than halfway through the year so let’s see where we’re at!

Revisit Old Goals

Started strong in January by finishing up a rainbow shawl that had been on the needles for quite some time:

I’d intended to release the pattern since I had an old goal about writing patterns but… honestly, I haven’t felt like it, and I focused my time on other stuff that was bringing me joy. But I have a bunch of pattern notes and a bit more time right now so I may publish what I have without bothering to polish it.

February I worked on an old Beanie Bag kit from Jimmy Beans Wool that spanned 3 months. It was… honestly kind of boring and the pattern had a bunch of mistakes/confusing bits, but I finished one month’s worth and will likely do the other two at some point.

March-April-May I finally got around to knitting Wingspan, which was on my “something famous” goal plan but I never made it. It was a pleasant knit once I got into the swing of things, but by the time I finished it was too warm to wear it here so I haven’t really gotten pictures! Here’s one from before it was blocked, though:

June I took a break from old goals (and focused on writing).

July I pulled out some gradient balls and made socks for my mom’s birthday (a bit early because the timing worked out), plus I did tour de fleece stuff.

Overall, A+ on revisiting old goals. I have a couple more “use kits from stash” ideas but I may otherwise declare this particular goal complete and focus on some other stuff.

Try Something New

January started strong with me working on a hexagon blanket, which I’m still working on between other projects.

February I tried assigned pooling and made the “Shard” shawl by Romi Hill. It was fun and I’ll likely do other assigned pooling patterns!

March-April-May I worked on Wingspan for the old goals and didn’t bother doing new stuff.

June again was a break from all knitting goals. (I was writing instead.)

July was mostly finishing up work/travel and I didn’t feel like learning something new.

There’s probably some more to be done here but… honestly, I’m not sure this goal is playing well with my burnout? I’ve got some tentative plans for learning some bookbinding in August if my kid is amenable so that might be up next. But I think I may just focus on finishing up the hex blanket rather than pushing myself to come up with new things to do if I’m not feeling it. So this goal may be as complete as it’s getting unless something fun occurs to me.

Stash Something Stash / Write more

I’d planned to run some kind of stash-focused event about appreciating what you have (as opposed to feeling guilty about what you have, a common vibe in a lot of “use your stash” events) and I got as far as coming up with a nice list of prompts and ideas. But then I realized that… I didn’t actually want to run it. I was burned out on social media and wanted to spend less time on my phone. So I’ve declared this goal as complete as it’s going to be. The prompts will keep if I decide I want to run things later.

That said, I replaced this goal that no longer fit with a goal of “Write more” instead since it was what was bringing me joy and it deserved some focus and time.

I’ve done a bit more writing for this blog but the biggest part of my writing this year has been fanfic since I’m having fun. I joined a discord to hang out with other writers in my current fandom of choice and I took part in a prompt challenge (which is why I didn’t knit as much in June-July so I could write). I’m now over the 40k “that’s a novel’s worth” of words since January and I’m pretty delighted with myself.

There’s something deeply satisfying in the current economic environment about making something that is basically non-monetizable put on a website run by a nonprofit (that I donated to!) and my output only serves to make strangers/new friends happy. And I definitely made a bunch of people happy! (Including my kid, who helped with some ideas in one of my stories.) Also I’m amused that my existing community of open source people and my new community of fan writers are somewhat similar and overlapping nerds. Not a surprise that people who share their creative outputs for free have some similarities but it’s still a delight.

I expect I’ll keep writing through the end of the year (and beyond but this post is about 2025 goals). I’ll probably join another challenge or two but even if I don’t do more than finish my current story in progress, I feel like this replacement goal has been met *and* it’s brought me a lot more joy than the original goal. And these goals have always been about finding time for things that bring me joy!

Game Design

It took waaaaay too long to get approval from work saying that my silly games weren’t going to conflict with my job at which point I was so frustrated with my boss for other reasons that I was intentionally trying to get put in the layoff pool (and I succeeded). But the end result is that I haven’t actually *done* any games stuff beyond a bit of helping my kid learn Scratch programming for his robot. I’m not replacing this goal because I still want to make games, but I haven’t figured out an actual plan yet so that’s on my list for part 2 of the year. So far I’ve got my personal laptop set up a bit better for game work (attached it to the kvm with my big screen and mouse) and I think I might aim to play around with some existing frameworks and make silly things with my kid as a goal for August.

More Thoughts

It turns out this year it hasn’t been *fiber* that was really keeping me happy. I mean, I still knit/spin/whatever but it’s writing and video games that have helped me cope with the burnout and grief (particularly from losing a friend earlier this year, but there’s grief tied up in climate and politics right now too). The fact that fiber wasn’t the perfect solution for this type of burnout makes sense because I needed something that engaged more of my brain and took me away from worrying about geopolitics/work/my deceased friend. I knit to focus my brain but when my brain is spiralling that’s not the right thing to do. I do knit-and-write-in-my-head a lot so it’s compatible with what works to distract me, at least, but fiber hasn’t been as much of a focus for a few months and I’m not sure if that’s going to change. I am wondering if I should stop calling these “fiber goals” next year so I can encompass some other hobbies, though.

With work as a stressor out of the way for now but more “international move” and “find a new job” stress coming, I’m intending to just roll with what works for these goals in the second half of the year. I *am* really enjoying using my fiber and stationary stashes now that I’m trying not to spend so much money — past me bought some lovely stuff and now I have time to use it. I think doing some game stuff is going to be fun when I sit down and start playing. And I’m really enjoying writing fanfic in a way that I haven’t in a long time, so I’m happy to keep leaning into that too. Last time I was involved in a fandom I presented as an artist, and writing is a different experience, and I’m loving it so much.

Fountain Pens & inks

Since I have the vacuum pen filled with yama-budo, I made this palette from that as a starting point. I do love a teal + dark fuschia vibe.

• TWSBI Swipe <1.1 stub> – Diamine Wishing Tree from Inkvent black, day 9. (Grey with green sparkle.)
• Pilot E95S <medium> – Diamine Aurora Borealis (dark teal with a bit of red sheen)
• Nahvalur Original Plus <1.1 stub> – Pilot Iroshizuku yama-budo (pinkish burgundy)

We’ll see if the shimmer ink drives me crazy in a week.

Stickers

• August calendar from By Mossy Pine
• Overly sparkly sea creature ice creams from Stickii (I want to love these but honestly I find the holographic effect hard to look at. The art is cute, though!)
• Tiny dessert stickers from Mind Wave (for calendar tracking)

And some small washi tape that my kid would describe as “cyan” because he thinks everything blue-ish is cyan.

Now that I’m back at home, I’m working on some paperwork and pull requests and trying to finish “The Grimmoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association” before it has to go back to the library. It’s been a pretty funny book since a lot of the “what the heck is going on, why are you giving the adults homework” vibes of “my kid is starting kindergarten” are very familiar to me even if *my* kid isn’t a werewolf in a magic school. I should probably work on my resume soonish but I’m choosing to give myself more time without recruiter emails while I deal with house stuff. So next week might be “do new crafts” week instead, plus writing time! But so far today has been “play Breath of the Wild” day and honestly I think it’s as important as anything else on my todo list because I *really* need to work through the burnout and I know games are a thing that works for me.

I don’t travel as much as I used to, so I think this is the first time I’ve brought a vacuum filling pen on a plane. I picked up a Nahvalur Original Plus last year when I was collecting a bunch of different fountain pens mostly to see what would stick.

This is a nice pen. I really love that the sparkles in the black parts are rainbow iridescent, which definitely sparks joy when I use it even though it’s not easy to photograph. I got a stub nib in it because I love the way it forces me to write with a bit more care to get something a bit more elegant. The wider nib might not have been the best choice for travel but I rarely get much time to write on my journeys nowadays so I’m not concerned about using a full tank of ink or too much paper, and I’ve shifted to using a pencil with my calendar so this is just for journal entries. So I guess the only downside for me personally is that I can’t use it as easily with cheaper pocket notebooks, I guess? It didn’t seem like enough reason to choose a smaller nib. The stub in this pen feels a bit less forgiving than some of the others in my collection when it comes to writing at different angles and starting on an up-stroke, but I can train myself on that.

No leaks on the plane, as expected. I’ll see how I feel about it after more trips, but so far I think it’s what I was hoping for as far as a travel option.

That said, it’s not really a favourite pen for regular use because it holds too much ink! I’ve been rotating my pens and inks monthly and this pen will last a lot longer than that, so once I put something in it I have to kind of work around that in my colour planning or handle the longer process of cleaning it. Good thing the vacuum mechanism is fun, but I have come to accept that this pen is probably not the best fit for me. Still, it is convenient for travel and I’m not sad to have bought it. This time it’s filled with Pilot Iroshizuku Yama-budo which is at least an ink I love to use so it won’t be too bad to make a dent in it before I get tired of it and clean out the pen.

Since I normally switch between 2-4 colours in a month mostly to keep me engaged and also to make it easier to see where the days switch in my journal, I decided to bring a second pen. This trip’s choice was a Kaweco Sport with a medium nib, because it’s small, has a very small converter, and it’s very easy to clean, so I could bring it with a sample vial of ink and clean it out before flying home. Easy peasy! I didn’t love this pen at first because it didn’t sit well in my previous pen case, but it’s been good in this new one and the tiny converter has worked out really well for my usage patterns of late where I’m writing in my journal a bit less (on account of writing more fiction, mostly). This time I brought another Pilot Iroshizuku ink to go with it, Ama Iro. I wanted something without sheen or shimmer to make life easy.

The Kaweco Sport has become among my favourite pens to clean because the converter is so easy, and sometimes my kid will even clean it for me if he’s bored and on the hunt for something. It’s not a screw, so it’s very quick to push it in and out. This is the older style of converter and it’s slightly easier to clean than the folding one but they’re both fairly easy you just have to be a bit more careful with the folding version. I’m actually tempted to get a shiny blue Liliput or one of the AL sport pens because I love shiny colourful aluminum, but I’m trying to cut back on spending while I’m unemployed so it likely won’t be soon unless I happen to catch a nice sale.

On the stationary front, I didn’t bring my current A5 journal because I assumed (correctly) that I’d get very little time to write on this trip and might as well use the blank pages at the back of my calendar since I’ll be switching it out in September and didn’t really need all of them for ink testing. (I use the calendar for tracking a few things and decided I wanted to bring it on this trip, though I don’t always.) I don’t *love* the slimmer format for journal writing when I’m at home and don’t have size constraints, but it’s nice for travel and I really love the zipper pouch attachment I bought so I can carry stickers around and actually *see* them.

And the pen case is the same one I’ve been using for a while now to keep my pens contained in my knitting bag. I definitely could have just thrown the pens in a zippered plastic bag in the bottom of the A5 pouch I use for everything, but I know the kaweco sport has gotten scratched up a bit from me carrying it so it’s nice to have it contained better in a case. And I really like this one!

Overall, it’s all worked quite well for tracking and journal writing this trip! Now if only I had a bit more time to write…

Inks & Fountain Pens:

• Pilot Metropolitan <CM> with KWZ Gummiberry
• Pilot E95S <M> with Pilot Iroshizuku kon-peki
• Ooly duo with original pink cartridge and orange highlighter

Stickers:

• Meowashi bubble tea dogs
• Stickii books and bunnies
• Mind Wave puppies
• The Latest Kate elephants

No changes to paper this month either!

Notes from last month:

• I picked up an Endless Phantom retractable fountain pen during their kickstarter and it arrived. Unfortunately it seems to dry out constantly, so I’m going to try reseating the gasket (they have a video on how to do this) and we’ll see if I have better luck after that. I spent a bit extra to get a fude nib and it writes beautifully when it writes, but it’s been pretty frustrating!

My books

Full Speed to a Crash Landing – I read the second one first so I had some idea of how this ended but wow it was fun to see how they got there. Kind of… space heist crossed with enemies to lovers vibes, but no resolution since this is book 1 of at least 3. Absolutely fun and I’m on the list for book 3 already.

Not many books this week because i was working my way through a book I bought which I actually still haven’t finished — it’s got a lot of grief and I need to move through that slowly right now. And also because I’ve been writing rather than reading.

Picture books

Rosie goes to preschool – meh. I glanced through it but kiddo didn’t even want to read it.

Grandpa Green – a repeat. about life and memory loss and gardening. Beautiful but I don’t think it resonates too much with my kid since he hasn’t actually experienced a grandparent with memory loss yet. He still loves the gardening art, though.

Puppy Bus – kid gets on the wrong bus to school and ends up getting a dog’s education. Adorable and funny.

Good Rosie – not sure I read this one? I can’t remember it.

Pete the Cat’s got class – don’t think i read this one either.

Just Like Millie – sweet, beautiful art. Learning to cope with life via dog.

Lizzy and the Cloud – also didn’t read this one. Usually I try to get to each book at least once but kiddo was really into some other books instead!

Molly & May – a brief friendship on a train. I liked it but kiddo was kind of meh on it.

My humongous hamster – a repeat.

Board Games

Gravity Maze – a puzzle game where you drop a marble from a start point to an end point. Cards of different difficulties give you different setups. My kid really enjoyed the easy levels then got bored, which is about par for the course for him on these. We found it a bit finicky to use at first but once we got the hang of how the pieces went together it was pretty fun and didn’t require reading.

Nmbr9 – competitive puzzle game where you place down oddly shaped numbered tiles in order, gaining more points as you stack them such that they don’t have any gaps underneath. Pretty fun, didn’t require any reading.

Unlock – A set of 3 escape room games. We only actually finished the first one. I don’t like that they required an app to do some of the puzzles, but it did have hints in it for when the puzzles were decidedly non-obvious, so that was nice at least. Not bad but definitely the kind of game that I’m glad I can borrow from the library rather than own.

Books part 1

Hyrule Historia – I picked this up for the manga at the end but it’s the rest of it that turned out to be a huge hit with my kid: it’s full of beautiful concept art from the Zelda games up to Skyward Sword. He spent a lot of time pouring over the ideas and coming up with his own ideas about how unused enemies would work and stuff. Plus he generated a bunch of ideas for me to use in fanfic thanks in part to how much he enjoyed this book.

Slightly Exaggerated – kind of fantasy/Indiana Jones vibes. I liked it.

The Broken Elf King – romantasy in a “she’s got super special magic powers” way that absolutely echoes “the chosen one” type narratives in a fun way. Like, what if the author just leaned into the joy of a fantastic mary sue romance? It’s like someone took a teenage girl self-insert and turned it into a real book with better-than-teenage writing, and it just rejoices in it. I had a lot of fun and have already grabbed the next book.

Shifting Earth – A climate disaster/portal fiction book. Hit too close to home in a lot of ways so absolutely not escapism but it was good.

A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation – some kind of isekai thing. Beautiful art and character interactions but not enough plot to really keep me intrigued.

I got abducted by aliens and now I’m trapped in a rom com – funny but I didn’t finish it. Not really the fault of the book: I got excited about writing my own fiction which makes me read waaaay slow because I keep stopping to think about my writing. As a result, my library loan timed out and I decided to cut my losses since I didn’t think I was going to stop writing any time soon.

Bikes not Rockets: intersectional feminist bicycle science fiction stories – Who can resist a title like that? Some great stories in this collection, and I enjoyed the whole concept of having bicycles in everything.

Picture Books

Bark, George – hilarious. A bit hit with my kid.

What do you do with a voice like that – didn’t read. Neither kid nor I am big into biographies of congresswomen (this was from one of the library’s mystery book bags).

Beloved repeats picture books

MVP: most valuable puppy, Say Hello to Zorro, and Cat Says, Dog Says. I’m actually surprised kiddo chose the last one since I didn’t think he was that into it the first time, but we’ve ready MVP and all the Zorro books a lot of times.

We have a plan to hopefully move my work open source project to be under a foundation (to be decided by the other maintainers and me), since work will no longer have the resources to maintain it in-house. We always could have forked and moved since it’s GPL but this way it should be a nice friendly transition. I’d set the groundwork for a lot of this earlier this year and I’m glad it’s working out.

My severance is generous enough that I don’t have to look for a job anytime soon. I’ll probably start job hunting sometime after my kid starts school in the fall, but I’m effectively paid quite a bit past that and I’m hoping to take advantage and do some fun stuff of my own choosing.

I know a lot of my colleagues are heartbroken to be leaving, but I’ve been managing burnout for a while so I’m profoundly relieved and happy to get out. I’m sure I’ll be sadder to be leaving as I’m saying goodbye to colleagues when we get closer to our last day (July 15), but for now I’m leaning into the joy and finishing stuff up and getting ready to move on.

New stuff

I picked up a KOKUYO journal cover for my current softcover journal. I also picked up a KOYUKO campus A5 calendar that will fit in there with it, in preparation for the end of summer when I need a new calendar. I keep an academic year calendar partially due to my own habit (getting a PhD and then doing a postdoc means I spent a lot of years in school) and also because I have a kid in school now so it’s nice to be able to have his whole school year on hand when planning stuff. The cover adds just enough extra rigidity to the setup to make it easier for me to write journal entries when I’m not using a flat surface, which is honestly most of the time for me as I typically write entries on my lap when I think of stuff. I’d previously been using writing boards for this but they tend to slip out so I think it’ll be less hassle overall. The only problem is that it’s just enough bigger that I can’t fit my pen case and journal into the same A5 pouch I’d been using, but that hasn’t annoyed me as much as I thought it would. I don’t think I’ve reached what I consider a *perfect* setup yet, but I definitely feel like the cover is a good addition.

The two KWZ inks are new: Firecracker is another “all that glitters” ink with the very small shimmer particles that make it more like a metallic gel pen than my other inks. I love it so much. BUT I will note that I used another ink from this line in my TWSBI Eco and had a lot of sparkle residue left over in the feed that caused mild problems, so I made sure to use this in a converter pen that should be easier to flush.

Gummiberry is less exciting as far as inks go, just me trying out a slightly brighter purple because I’ve learned that I mostly find darker inks disappointing. I didn’t pick up this hobby to then have writing that I could get with just any pen. I want bright colours, sparkle, drama! But I’ve been having a rough time with shimmer inks lately (possibly because I’m writing more on the computer and less by hand) so I’m trying to enjoy some options that are less of a hazard. This one is nice and I like it.

I picked up a second Kaweco Sport pen with a broad nib (it’s the yellow one) and got a calligraphy nib for my existing blue pen. The broad nib is an utter delight with the Firecracker ink. It feels absurdly smooth and looks beautiful. The 1.1mm calligraphy nib seems to be a bit less forgiving for everyday writing than my existing stub nibs, but it’s kind of fun when I use it right. I suspect, again, that I’m having more trouble with it because of the shimmer ink I’m using — lots of small skipping problems with the ink flow. But I’ve seen a few reviewers comment that the feed has trouble keeping up with the wider calligraphy nibs on this pen so it might not be the ink, I don’t know. I’ll try it on something less sparkly eventually. I like the size of the Kaweco Sport because I’ve got small hands but also because the tiny converter makes it closer to the amount of ink I actually use in a month. Who knew I’d be so into small converters?

Not new but I don’t think I talked about it before: I picked up a Lihit Labs “Compact” pencil case to hold my pens so they wouldn’t get so scratched up (the reason my existing Kaweco hasn’t been in rotation was that it was getting kind of beat up in my previous pencil case). A lot of the pen cases I looked at were very expensive and lots of them were made of leather. I like leather in general, but it’s heavy and seemed likely to get really torn up the way my journal supplies wind up in the bottom of my knitting bag that I then carry around the house all the time. This was reasonably priced and solves the problem, though I likely want to find a thinner eraser-pen thing so it fits in there, because my existing eraser has a bulky little case and honestly I mostly erase tiny calendar stuff so smaller would be fine.

Stickers

• purple bunnies from TheLatestKate’s patreon
• bunnies and books from PinkPafu via stickii
• bunnies and flowers from Dai and Qin via stickii

I think both the stickii ones were from this year’s advent. I’ve been thinking about advents since the yarn ones are starting preorders now, and I think I’d probably do the stickii one again, but I’m less sure about the Diamine ink one because I definitely won’t have made as much of a dent in using the inks as I have the stickers unless I start writing a lot more. But the inks were more fun actually *in* December than the stickers were because I enjoyed all the swatching. It may be all a moot point as work is figuring out layoffs right now so who knows if I’ll even have a job to be spending money on advent stuff, but I find it good to think about these things in advance so I don’t get trigger happy when things come up for pre-order.

Fountain Pens & Inks

• Kaweco sport <b> – KWZ All That Glitters – Firecracker
  • an orange-red ink with gold shimmer. More like a metallic gel pen than most shimmer inks. The “gimmick” is that it’s suppose to need less agitation and it’s true. I find it a lot easier to use as an everyday writing ink.
• Kaweco sport <1.1> – Diamine – Pine Needle.
  • Green that honestly isn’t quite like either new or old pine needles, but it’s a nice colour anyhow. Lots of gold/green shimmer. Was an absolute dream to use the day after I put it in the pen, but I think the feed is slowly clogging up with the shimmer because it’s already getting less fun to use. I’ll probably try to use it more for my todo list/craft tracking and see if the problem is mostly that it’s getting used every 4 days instead of more often, but it may just need more agitation before I try writing.
• Pilot E95S <m> – Pilot Iroshizuku – kon peki
  • A repeat from last month. Still the nicest nib I own and I love using it.
• Pilot Metropolitan <cm> (not pictured because it was getting cleaned) – KWZ Gummiberry
  • A nice bright purple with a bit of shading. Easy to use.

My books

(first one I own, other two from the library)

Kitemaster by Jim Hines. I accidentally pre-ordered this twice, which probably gives you some idea of how I felt about it. A young woman mourning her husband goes to release his spirit kite only to discover she has developed a rare magical gift, and she soon attracts the attention of some very powerful people… I loved the worldbuilding around kite magic (safety lines! The spirit kites!) and the sky serpents and the poetic legends about dragons and the evil queen and the sky pirates and the race of monkey-like people. Maybe it feels particularly good to me right now because I’ve been playing a game which includes a lot of gliding around in the sky, but I wanted to live in this world. There’s also a lot about grief and cultural traditions around mourning in there, in a way that I had to stop and let it sink in sometimes. In a good way.

Halfway There – A graphic novel about being half Japanese and half American, but mostly it was about finding yourself and depression. Her experience of people’s weird reactions to her being “hafu” resonated but the self-loathing not so much.

The Roommate by Rosie Danan – I’ve read a few from her and they’re all different. I find it kind of hilarious that I felt like this one was less believable than the werewolf one but honestly I love a kind of absurd premise as long as the characters are fun. And they are! Just… I’d recommend Fan Service (the werewolf book) over this one. It’s the most recent one and I think the characters are even better despite the premise being more absurd.

Kid books:

Catnapped is a repeat, so kiddo liked it enough to get it out again. Or he liked that it has a cat in it and he’s got this thing where he wants his allergic dad to fake sneeze for fake cats so my kid is extra motivated to get cat books out of the library.

Bob and Joss get lost – ok but no repeat requests on this one

Amazing Grace – never read it, kid wasn’t interested. (Recall: we get mystery bags from the library and not all of them are winners for him)

Storm Whale in Winter – spawned some good conversations about snow safety but no repeat requests

Little Blue Truck Makes a Friend – kid had fun with the animal noises but was mad I made him read some of this so it was slower going than it could have been.

Charlie Chooses – very cute, lots of dogs, we read this a few times.

Toby – another repeat. cute dog, kind of melancholy story so i was surprised he got it out again.

Board Game

Despite the giant box this is mostly a card/dice game where you build a little city and money based on dice roles hitting your numbers. None of the cards are secret held in your hand, so that was great for my kid’s reading level (he can read but it’s a lot of work and he gets tired of doing it), and the rounds are pretty fast and the rules not too complicated. We may buy a copy of this one.