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Fountain pen corner
Hi tilders (tildes? tilded?),
I thought it might make sense to group threads by hobby for now, to start -- and the hobby I've been spending the most time with recently has been fountain pens. They're great! I hope you like them too.
Wrote something out to kick things off: https://i.imgur.com/vNOS7QK.jpg
Write something back in return?
I love fountain pens! I am pretty new to the hobby. Due to budget restraints, I haven't been able to get as many as I would like to have. So far I have a Pilot Metropolitan, 2 Wing Sung 3008, and a Lamy Studio. I'll take a picture of them tomorrow.
EDIT: This is the picture of the pens as promised
Your pens are gorgeous! The shading in Noodler's BBK is amazing.
I was really into the hobby a couple of years ago. I wrote all my study notes in fountain pens. The feedback, tactility and colours are unbeatable! However...I fell into the paperless dark side because of my Surface Pro...
Ahh I love color coded notes! Yours are lovely. Wish I'd been into this all while I was still in school -- I was even writing notes by hand, just stuck to a metal Rotring 600 pencil for almost all of it.
I don't have any fountain pens, but your writing looks great! :)
Hey, thanks! Highly recommend trying one sometime if you haven't - there are some pretty good ones for relatively cheap (Lamy Safaris and TWSBI Ecos can be had for $20-30) and they've totally changed my relationship with writing for the better. Like with a lot of things, a good way to encourage yourself to do something more is to make it more fun!
No problem :) Is there a special type of paper that is recommended for this?
Sure, so at the basic level you want something that is thick enough to a) not tear with sharper nibs, and b) not bleed through or "feather" (which is where the ink kind of makes a fuzzy pattern because the paper is too absorbent and pulls it in a bunch of directions outside the intended line). In general, anything that is a level up from cheap printer paper or legal pads (legal pads are really awful with fountain pens!) will work.
A lot of people in the pen community like Rhodia paper. I have found it to be pretty good but not my absolute favorite. Current favorites are:
Stalogy 365 notebook. I'm not sure what kind of paper this is -- definitely something Japanese -- but have found it to perform extremely well with wet inks and thick lines, which is my general preference.
Tomoe River paper. The link is to a notebook but there are loose leafs and pads. This is generally considered the gold standard for fountain pen folks right now, as far as I've been able to tell. It is thin and you can see some ink on the other side, but it performs really well with a range of inks and nibs apart from that.
Midori cotton. I looove this except for the fact that I've only been able to find it in very small sizes. It is really pleasant to write on and performs great with no feathering. It's almost like... anti-feathering; I don't know how to describe it, but the edges of lines are super crisp, noticeably moreso than in my other notebooks.
Other popular papers/notebooks are the Leuchtturm series (more for planners) and Clairefontaine. Truth be told, though, I think as long as it's even a smidge above the cheapest possible paper it will probably work fine. At the beginning when I first started getting into all this, I used these notebooks and for $6 a pop they did the job just fine. Here's a little more in-depth writeup if you'd like to know a bit more about the above: http://fountainpenlove.com/paper/best-paper-fountain-pens/
(slight edit to link for the Stalogy - B5 size or bust!)
Thanks, this is great :) Now if only I could save comments...
I'm not a pen person, as my handwriting isn't great to begin with and I make a lot of mistakes. That said, I do love me some fine mechanical pencils. It's not super nice, but I got a Graphgear 1000 for Christmas, and it really puts the plastic ones I used to use to shame.
A good mechanical pencil can really make the difference. I got an Uni Kuru Toga and I don't regret spending a couple of extra bucks for that pencil.