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Drifting a bit and being okay with it.
Pilot Legance 89S with Pilot Black
Kaweco Student with Robert Oster Fire on Fire
Lamy Studio with Waterman Mysterious Blue
What's that washi tape doing there? Changing the game.
The Kaweco 1.1 and Custom Nib Studio Perspective nibs help highlight the shading of Fire on Fire and Mysterious Blue.
Gone from last time: Leonardo Momento Zero and Sheaffer 440. Those pens left me with a few impressions. I should use the Leonardo more often, particularly since I have two nibs for it. It’s such a good fit for my hand. The 440 was bought on a whim but feels worth hanging on to. Something else should probably go to make room for it. Several pens should go, now that I mention it.
The Studio was picked to test out another Lamy nib to see if I want to send it out for a grind (I do) and after a few days I swapped over to the Perspective nib from Custom Nib Studio. It’s versatile and fun to use.
The Kaweco Student hadn’t seen daylight in quite a while. Of all the full size Kawecos I’ve tried, this model feels the best for me. More substantial than the Perkeo and more visually appealing than the Dia, Original, or Elite. However, there’s an issue that kept me away from the Student — its smooth metal grip.
When I first got the pen, I wasn’t too bothered with the grip but the more I used it the more frustrating it became. The size and contour are fine but the slickness of the metal is such that it’s hard to index the pen to have the nib where I want it consistently. I’d thought about inking it up in the past few months as I cycle through unused pens but the grip put me off. Rather than find a solution for an otherwise nice pen I let it languish in the drawer.
A few days ago, I was searching for something in a pile of stationery and picked up a few rolls of washi tape to move them out of the way. Washi is kind of like duct tape in that you can use it for many purposes. For being so lightweight and flexible, washi wears quite well and works great as a spine or edge reinforcement on notebooks. Somehow my brain connected washi to the Kaweco grip issue and wondered if a little tape could help.
A strip about 2” long and 5/16” wide set in the middle of the grip made a real difference. The section’s concavity means the tape doesn’t apply perfectly flat in a straight piece, but any wrinkling or overlap is minor and doesn’t bother me. The tape doesn’t interfere with capping or uncapping, which wouldn’t necessarily be true of all pens, so I lucked out there. The fact that the pen doesn’t slip or twist between my fingers like it used to is the difference between wanting to use it and practically forgetting I owned it.
For as much as I like swapping out nibs and tinkering around with part interchangeability on pens, I feel silly for not trying a fix like this sooner. It seems obvious in hindsight. Even so, this is a benefit of trying to keep in touch with all the tools we own. On a small scale we can rediscover what we forgot about, approach things differently with what we’ve learned in the interim, and make more informed choices about what we want going forward.
Still messing around with the Pilot Parallels. Nibs like this feel the most natural for my cursive writing. The crisp wide line and having more metal in contact with the page just seems to click better. The spacing is tricky since the letter sizing with some of these nibs is much larger than I normally write. Still, there are times where I’ll start with a few random words or a song lyric and then hit a groove to keep writing whatever pops into my head next. That act of writing without thinking it over is fun but can lead me to start going too fast. That speed causes then pen to skip on the page because the angle goes awry and then I’ve lost control of the car, so to speak. The groove, for as long as it lasts, is worth the stopping and starting to get there.
