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Yes, the picture is current and I wrote the wrong year. No, I'm not going back to fix it.
This month’s pens are all using J. Herbin inks from the Colors of Paris set. I was browsing Ink Flights at InkJournal and there were some of these left over from last year. I love Herbin ink and Tom’s sample packs are always great so it was an easy buy.
I want to take a moment to recognize what Tom Oddo has done with the monthly Ink Flight samples because he announced that the 100th edition in May will be the last one. Running a subscription service for that long and continually finding new products to excite your customers is an accomplishment. While I just bought here and there rather than getting ink every month, Tom’s packs turned me on to more inks than I ever could have known about or tried otherwise. For that, and for Tom’s dedication to growing and helping the stationery community, I am grateful.
As for the pen themselves — Decimo takes its usual spot at work, King of Pen is (mostly) on journal duty, and the Tank came out because I just wanted a wide nib for shits & giggles.
The inks are all as I would expect from Herbin in quality and behavior. Tour Eiffel is the most compelling so far because it’s an interesting color and shades a lot. The KoP broad nib has quite a bit of fun with it.
While 2025 started strong by transcribing an Oscar Wilde poem, February and March did not sustain the momentum. I moved over to Yeats poems and while there’s plenty of good material there, I was going page to page in a large anthology looking for things that caught my eye. This was not as effective for daily progress compared to working on the single Wilde poem. I broke off Yeats for a bit to random song lyrics just so I could get some traction on using the journal at all. I’ve come back to the poems in the past few weeks but I must evaluate another subject matter plan for next month that helps keep the train on track. That’s only 5 days away, where the hell did the time go?
"...glittering summer runs upon the dancer by the dreamless wave" was a line that caught me out. The man knows how to turn a phrase.
After a few months of not much going on, several things have happened lately that I want to write up individually. Subjects include two new Pelikan pens, meeting Kirk Speer at a local shop visit, my Visconti Opera taking an ugly turn, and the pen budget/buying priorities being defined for the rest of the year. Stay tuned for a more fruitful May.