Summer Mail - Birds and Cats

Enjoying a warm summer evening on the balcony, penning a letter to a dear friend with my Pelikan Fantasia. My tomcat Chaplin quietly relaxing next to me.

The Fantasia, currently with a BB italic nib, has been inked since I got it last winter (with Herbin Stormy Grey, though many inks will look nice with this pen and nib). Pelikan M1000s are just great writers overall.

If you'd like to know more about the pen you could check out my post from back then with more infos and photos.

Mystery pen unveiled: Pelikan maki-e Fantasia

This week there's no "Weekly Pens" picture as there's been virtually no change since last week! Instead the mystery pen is being unveiled.

It came in a golden cardboard box with a paulownia wood box and some papers inside. The kanji are unreadable to me but my guess would be they are spelling the name of the pen or maybe the workshop which made it? Maybe one of my readers knows?

After opening the lid of the wooden box, the pen is safely nestled within folds of cream satin.

According to Pelikan the design is inspired by kimono patterns. On a backdrop of byakudan-nuri work - flakes of gold foil covered by lacquer - cherry blossoms and hexagons are painted in different colors of lacquer. Each hexagon is filled with a traditional Japanese motif. There is also amber (I think) and raden work.

There's one with the Asanoha pattern, gold on greeen with silver center points. I really like this pattern. Might get it tattooed one day. More eye candy following:

What really makes this pen special is the idea of a non black background. It's perfect, warm and vibrant without being overly colorful (YMMV).
Right now there's a medium nib in it. Filled with Noodler's Antietam which seems to reflect the color of the reddish brown lacquer backdrop.

Pelikan M1005 or: Time for Orange - yet again!

On most days I'm not perfectly sure what my favorite color is. On other days I just know it's orange.

It's also the perfect color for autumn to lighten up those gray and stormy days - so after I've shown you Iroshizuku yu yake and and Montblanc "Ink of Joy" last year here's yet another orange ink, the (sadly discontinued) Caran d'Ache Saffron.

Pelikan M1005 Demonstrator with Caran d'Ache Saffron

 I've had that M1005 Demonstrator for a while but haven't used it too much, mainly because it comes with a rather limited range (F, M, B) of full rhodium plated nibs. I ordered it with an F but then it seems I'm not really an F nib kind of girl.

So I decided to "frankenpen" it with one of my regular M1000 nibs so I could get to use my gorgeous reground and crisped up BB, 3B or O3B. This is the awesome 3B: great line variation, wet, responsive and "soft" as is common for the M1000 size nibs. Nib work has been done by John Sorowka.

It's hard for me to overlook such mismatches usually but it's not so bad this time. There's a lot of rhodium plating on that nib anyway and it matches alright with the orange ink adding warm color to the insides of barrel and section.

I  have two demonstrator pens, this one and a TWSBI (not counting the semi transparent and somehow quite demonstrator-like Omas Extra Lucens), but somehow I've never gotten around to putting orange ink into any of them until now. Most orange inks truly are amazing for transparent pens. Saffron almost looks blood red. I haven't heard of it staining anything either.

Pelikan M1005 Demonstrator with Caran d'Ache Saffron

Quote by Frank Herbert from the "Dune" series.

I haven't tried an orange ink which I didn't like - except maybe for Stipula Zafferano which also looks very nice but is just too light to be easily readable.

Caran d'Ache Saffron is great in every respect: easily readable, offers great shading and flow properties. The color is a bright orange lacking the "burnt" aspect of yu yake or Noodler's Apache Sunset but is not as highlighter-ish as Montblanc's "Ink of Joy". If you love orange and have the chance to snatch up a bottle: do it before they're gone for good!

Do you like to use orange ink? What's your favorite?

Come, thou tortoise! Pelikans M800 and M600

Are you already bored with warm colors for fall? If so you might want to skip this post because I'm definitely not!

Pelikan M600 Tortoise & White and M800 Tortoise & Brown

Pelikan M600 Tortoise & White and M800 Tortoise & Brown

I know fairly little about Pelikan's history but there is something special about the tortoise celluloids. They've been around a lot in the 1950s and many of those look very nice to this day. What I didn't know until the M800 brown tortoise came out is that there are indeed two different tortoise colors, brown and green.

Pelikan M600 Tortoise & White and M800 Tortoise & Brown

The green tortoise on the M600 is much brighter, more transparent and looks warmer in combination with the white resin. It goes really well with the yellow gold accents on the cap, section ring and nib. Overall the M600 has a much more striking appearance.

Pelikan M600 Tortoise & White and M800 Tortoise & Brown

The M800 brown tortoise is somewhat more subtle and "serious". There are a lot of greyish brown hues with only a few warm coppery highlights in between. Section and cap are a very dark brown that looks almost black.

I guess the Pelikan Souveran series is so well known I don't have to take any measurements. ;)

Pelikan M800 tortoise brown

Now housing an OBB nib, sharpened up by John Sorowka. (The M600 is fitted with an OB nib which has undergone the same treatment but I didn't make a writing sample of that one).

Pelikan M800 OBB writing sample with Diamine Ancient Copper

Pelikan M600 Tortoise & White and M800 Tortoise & Brown

Diamine Ancient Copper seriously is one great ink color though it has its flaws. If you look closely at the pictures above you can see that it already started building up some crud on the nib while exposed to air for the photos. This is a common issue with this ink especially with caps that allow a lot of air circulation. The M800 cap closes tightly enough so this usually doesn't happen in this pen.

Also these days I tried the 120g/sqm paper by Karstadt "System" (a chain of large convenience stores here in Germany). The paper is available in various colors and weights in wads of 50 or 100 sheets. I forgot about the exact price but it was between 5 and 7 Euros for 50 A4 or 100 A5 sheets.

I tried some 120g/sqm in A5 and 160g/sqm in A6, both ivory colored. It's awesome with fountain pens, not too smooth, doesn't eat up all the shading and feels very nice and crisp. Great for composing a letter on it.

Besides: Have a very happy fountain pen day everyone! A great day to write a letter, make a review, take some photos, organize your blog or ink up some pens. Are you planning any fountain pen related activity today?

A time for birds

Followed a fancy and made this shot of two Pelikans. Can you guess which ones they are?

When I started reviving my interest in fountain pens 3 years ago I wasn't much into Pelikans, at least not into the Souverans. Their uniform Stresemann look appeared generic and boring to me. It wasn't until some time later that I grew fond of their depth and richness of color. Now I own a few Souverans plus two striking limited editions with mother of pearl.

These two are relatively large pens so they sport some juicy nibs to match: a factory IB and an OBB modified for more line variation by John Sorowka.

The Raden Pelikans

Pelikan M1000 Sunlight and Moonlight side by side

Got enough of the sparkly stuff already? Then bear with me just a little longer for I've got some more comparison shots to show.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight & Sunlight

As you can see, the Raden stripes on the Sunlight, although narrower, catch the light more readily and give a more vivid reflection. The Moonlight gives a more peaceful overall impression. (Just came across an eBay listing where the seller had a wild mix of Sunlight and Moonlight pictures in his auction. The auction was about the Sunlight only. Zzzz... It's not that hard to see the difference, is it?)

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight & Sunlight

I haven't managed to take a really good photo of the artist's signatures so this will have to do. As you can see the pens were done by different workshops/artists. It doesn't bother me but it's still a weird thing to do when you're planning to issue a duo of pens.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight & Sunlight

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight & Sunlight

So which one do you like better? I find it hard to decide.

Pelikan M1000 Sunlight

 ... yes, finally! :-D

It took me quite a while to work out the best lighting for Abalone shell and as I haven't had much success I went back to using plain daylight. So here's the long awaited pictures.

Pelikan M1000 Sunlight

Like the M1000 Moonlight it's Raden work done on a black M1000 corpus. The stripes on the Sunlight, however, are somewhat narrower and much more vivid in color, ranging from yellow to green, blue and purple. I could imagine this burst of color just needs to be counterbalanced by larger black spaces, else it would probably make you dizzy.
The color difference to the Moonlight, which is mostly done in shades of green, blue and purple, is due to different kinds of mother of pearl. First I thought it's just different parts of the shell, but it's actually different species. The sea snail with blue-green mother of pearl is found in the Australian sea whereas the other kind is found in the Japanese sea.

Pelikan M1000 Sunlight

Every raden strip is made of one piece, running over the full length of cap and barrel.

Pelikan M1000 Sunlight

Wouldn't it be a shame not to write with this pen? I certainly think so, so I've been writing with it on a daily basis for a few weeks now. Unlike many other collectibles this pen is neither weirdly shaped nor extremely heavy so it offers the writing feel you can expect from a Pelikan M1000. At the moment it's fitted with a sharpened-up O3B nib and filled with Iroshizuku Ajisai.

Pelikan M1000 Sunlight

Here's proof: a dirty nib.

I also took some pictures for direct comparison with the M1000 Moonlight which I will post a little later on. :)

Pelikan Sunlight on its way!

As I've been quite busy for the last week and didn't manage to take some more pictures for the blog, I just quickly want to share that my Pelikan M1000 Sunlight is on its way and I'll probably receive it within the week. Looking forward to that one a lot!

In the meantime there's another picture of the Pelikan Moonlight and the Namiki Yukari Nightline Moonlight to enjoy. Love sparkly, shimmery Raden.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight and Namiki Yukari Moonlight Raden fountain pens.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight - The one that shines in the dark

Mystery Pen Unveiled

There are surfaces which love light, drink it, bathe in it while back in the shade they look subdued and dark. This also goes for pen's surfaces. Dark tame-nuri or tame-midori is an example, it can look almost black except when hit by a ray of sunlight (or a studio flash).

But then there's also those which start to shine when the light gets dim, like this Danitrio Mae West kawari-nuri which doesn't unfold its full charm in the sunlight.

Raden is another example, too much light and it looks dull. Put a Raden pen in a dimly lit spot and it will sparkle in the darkness like the neon lights of a nightly city.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight and Namiki Yukari Nightline Moonlight

That the Mystery Pen was a Raden pen was easily discernible. Raden is a Japanese technique where pieces of abalone shell - beautiful colourful mother of pearl from Sea snails -, is attached to a surface with clear Urushi lacquer. It's often used in combination with maki-e and is a traditional Japanese art form. What makes the mystery pen all the more interesting is that it is a German pen, a Pelikan, to be accurate.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight

The artwork, for which Pelikan employed a Japenese artist, Mr. Norio Matsuda, is done on the body of a Souverän M1000 as a limited edition from 2011. Raden work requires a lot of experience and patience. It's flawless. Mainly abalone pieces with a blue or green shimmer were picked to give an impression of cool moonlight, though their spectrum will also include a fair portion of purple depending on the viewing angle.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight

I posted this picture already but I'll have to show it again because it shows the abalone's lovely surface so clearly. Look at those ripples, like waves in a grotto or under a strange moon. The abalone stripes, though, are perfectly straight. It's all optics.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight

The great thing about this pen is that it can always be your daily writer no matter what nib you feel like using. As with all Souveräns, you can always switch the nib yourself quickly and easily. This one is a BB nib, ground to cursive italic by John Sorowka.

I felt that it was time to do a review of this pen, not only because I like it so much but also because there's not a whole lot of info around about this pen since so few pieces were made and the owners seem to prefer to keep quiet about it.

To see such large pieces of Raden on a pen seems to be relatively rare. More frequently what seems like a large pieces is many minute Raden fragments put together mosaic style. When I get to it I'll show some more examples of how it can be used. It's a fascinating topic. I don't know if I will ever feel old enough to wear pearls, but mother of pearl on pens... or the pearl on the Montblanc Greta Garbo ... that's another story altogether.

The oldest age - Pelikan 400

While I thought of an interesting way to introduce my pens, the idea of a personal "Best of" occured to me, since my "collection" doesn't have a specific theme yet. It's a crowded lot of vintage (few) and modern (most) pens, large and small, made of all kinds of materials, though there is a lot of Urushi, the traditional Japanese lacquer, around lately. So since it's a little hard to get an order into this, I'll just start by presenting the extremes and go from there.

Personal Best of, Part 1

Since I'm less than an expert at vintage pens it's hard to say. It might be this Pelikan 400 Tortoise from the 1950s (of course it's not genuine tortoiseshell but celluloid). I'd like to tell a nice story about how it has been my grandma's pen and she gave it to me when I finished school, but unfortunately I just bought it. Next to my mostly larger and heavier pens it looks like something from another era - fountain pens just used to be smaller back then! 

It has a very nice semi-flexible nib but I still don't use it much - it might be because of the size but more likely because the nib has some starting problems. Obviously, even back in that time some nibs just were annoying.

The pen pouch, however, is indeed a heirloom from my boyfriend's family. It comes from Eastern Germany and was used as a school accessory by his aunt and by himself later on. It's a little battered but still looks nice and, most remarkable, it's really well thought through. One of my pens leaked Diamine Oxblood onto the lining and it cleaned off very well which I hadn't expected at all (and wonder if this could be expected from a, say, Montblanc pen pouch?).
An interesting feature: The five lashes which hold the pens are made of leather and in different sizes. None of them would be large enough to accomodate a modern pen though - and vintage pens do look best in it.