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Since succumbing to the Hobonichi Cousin last year, I have been enjoying matching my fountain pen ink colour to that of the daily pages. The Japanese versions of this planner has lovely, slightly dusty, faded vintage colours which change for each month. The whole page is printed in that colour - grid, Japanese quote, date and day markets etc. So I thought it would be fun to write using a matching ink - a great excuse for exploring some of the glorious colours now available and a built in excuse for changing inks regularly. This idea was inspired by a blog I saw (sorry, can't remember who) where the writer had done a similar project but using gel pens. I know everyone's experiences of ink colour is different, depending on pen, nib, paper, how heavy-handed your are, phase of the moon (who knows? Maybe) but I thought someone out there may be doing something similar and we could share our thoughts. Anyway, here are my selections so far: January: burnt orange - Monteverde Fire Opal February: bronze brown - my own mix using Platinum mixable inks March: pinky purple - Herbin Larmes de Cassis April: red pink - Colorverse Sea Europa May: bright olive - KWZ green Gold Ii or Monami Olive June: grey green - another custom mix - see above July: grey turquoise - Birmingham Pen Co Fountain Turquoise August: blue grey - another custom mix - see above September: warm brown - Krishna Vaikhari October: grey purple - another custom mix - see above November: pine green - Birmingham Pen Co Fern Hollow Creek December: faded red - another custom mix - see above. As you can see, I've ended up mixing some colours myself - lots of fun, and I'm less happy with some of the other choices so will need to explore further. For example, I find the Herbin colours a bit watery but haven't yet found a similar colour to Larmes de Cassis; the Krishna Vaikhari is a nice colour but not quite yellow enough... I generally stick to relatively easily available inks and would like to expand the brands but I like this selection as a first pass. I should add that I'm using a Pilot Metro with a Plumix EF or F calligraphy nib. If anyone else is doing this, I'd love to see your choices or generally, any thoughts.