Your Most Recent Impulsive Ink Purchase? (Replacement Bottles Don't Count.. Only 1St Timers!)

[Mercian]

6 hours ago, lascosas said:

I started last night with their April 2024 ink.  The monthly inks are 100 ml (versus their normal 30) and are free with orders of 10 inks.  It is a brown shading ink with bronze (?) shimmer.  How long will it take to try the other 27?  Oh, a long time.

Well, you could decide to try to re-create a ‘Carpet Page’ in the style of one of the ‘Insular Gospel Books’ that were produced in various monasteries in the British Isles in the first millennium. Just before our Scandinavian neighbours realised that these treasure-houses full of gold and silver housed only monks, were therefore effectively unguarded, and came here a-viking 😉

 

The most-famous examples of such books are the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, and the Lichfield/St. Chad Gospels.

They were produced with dyes that the monks made out of local plants, and they are amazing 😊

[Bo Bo Olson]

So much gold and silver was sent to Rome, (a constant drain for century after century,) English money became so debased it wasn't worth anything....but it wasn't the money the vikings stole but the solid gold chalices and crosses.

Henry the 8th was a monster, murdering 1/5th or 1/4th his population by turning the farms into sheep ranches for the rich, in wool made big export money, and hanging the starving unemployed farmers.

 

The reason Bill Shakespeare (who read Ovid in Latin at age 7...school) ended up hanging around with despicable characters,  in London, with more books for sale than the Universities had.

Well, the reason he didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge with 13-14 was his father got caught  wool smuggling and lost his job as Mayor of Stanford....and his enemy was turning him in to the law every time  Pop turned around. (With bill's parents; there is a major love story between a love driven commoner and a Gentry lady who waited for him to make something out of himself.) So there was no money for Collage.... And London was full of folks that had been to Verona, and told him stories of young love.

 

Hamlet and King Lear along with Baowolf were originally written in the 5th century... So Bill was the Spielberg of his day. It was major bad luck to murder the mad; which explains the mad Prince, who is not mad listening to a ghost???

Hamlet was also written by Kidd a generation before Bill but the English language changed so much in just a generation, we can't read Kidd.

 

The reason Bill stopped writing poetry, which is had work, was he was no longer in London, going from book shop to book shop or printer to printer seeing if he found his pirated work, to turn over to a lawyer.....

 

Queen Elisabeth was supposed to be assassinated by Duke of Norfolk while watching Shakespeare in Richard...he was slightly involved so along with Johnson, was forced to join the Queen's Players and spy around England for Elisabeth.

[Mercian]

@Bo Bo Olson are you aware of the stupid theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford?

 

Never mind the fact that said toff was actually dead-and-buried before the last Shakespeare plays were written…

 

…who is more-likely to learn to write plays to please audiences (because he needed the cash from ‘bums on seats’):

a) a jobbing actor-turned playwright who had learned his Classics at his Grammar School, or;

b) a hereditarily-wealthy toff who had a rentier’s income?

 

It depresses (but does not surprise) me that the authorship ‘debate’ still rumbles-on in class-obsessed Inglistan 😞
 

England is a Silly place!

[Bo Bo Olson]

3 minutes ago, Mercian said:

Never mind the fact that said toff was actually dead-and-buried before the last Shakespeare plays were written…

I didn't know that...and Bacon had other things to do...like freeze chickens; be involved with writing spy code  and so on....but it was intellectual snobs who didn't know that Bill was a lively student, who had his father not been caught, been forgotten  to history...becoming a collage educated minister or government clerk.

 

And I believe Marlow ended up dead on the floor and not skipping out to Italy to write plays for a distant audience.

 

Being a glove maker was a high class profession...or he's not been Mayor...in only the rich could afford gloves...Pop wasn't a mitten maker.

 

How can a commoner with no education, write great plays....

Only half right, his mother and her family were long established Gentry.

Make that intellectual rich snobs.

 I don't remember if he bought up the family house that was sold to pay for the smuggling fees, or the house next door, but when he came home he did rub  some folks noses into the Pig S.

 

[A Smug Dill]

New "company anniversary" promo campaign on Taobao just started a few hours ago, and this time the Collection Traced (ink brand) store is participating, so I took advantage of that and ordered fifteen of its chromatographic shading "gradient" inks. Those products were pretty much the reason why I signed up for a Taobao account in the first place in 2021. Shipping ink from China back then would've been a lot trickier and a lot more expensive, so I never ended up trying to order. Now, though, it certainly appears to have become much easier and "friendlier".

 

So, fifteen 19ml bottles cost me just over AUD $75, inclusive of tax, shipping, and credit card surcharges.

 

p.s. Picking fifteen out of thirty from a single listing was not as easy as it sounds! Oh, and the company's marketing images, especially for the later series, were not organised as helpfully as the earlier ones, so I had to download dozens of images and then resize, cut (out the distracting elements), and stitch them together to give myself a better overview:

 

 

(The original images were much larger and of higher resolution, but because of the practical image size limits for what is served by the FPN Image Gallery, I downsized them before uploading them; so some of the multi-hued shading may not be as apparent.)

[Penguincollector]

  I just received this Ban Mi pu-yue shimmer ink in very Piloty styled packaging. I ordered a red with gold shimmer, I hope it’s the shade I want. I can’t open it yet.

[Misfit]

The Well Appointed Desk blog chief blogger Ana went through her ink stash, and put some up for sale. The inks are lightly used for a couple pen fills and swatching. 
 

I bought Kaweco Midnight Blue and Sunrise Orange, and the 65ml bottle of Colorverse Sea of Tranquility. I have been wanting Kaweco Midnight Blue. The Kaweco inks were $5, and the Colorverse ink was $10. Shipping was $8.80 or so. 

[inkstainedruth]

On 5/4/2024 at 5:40 PM, Mercian said:

@Bo Bo Olson are you aware of the stupid theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford?

Years and years ago my brother and I read a book about codes and cyphers and it includes the "Francis Bacon -- author author author" one.  But then said someone ELSE used the same cypher and it came up as something like "Silly Bacon - *I* wrote those plays! -- Shakespeare" 

(My money was NEVER on Bacon as the "real" author, BTW....)

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[StrawberryDaquiri]

Saw a bottle of TACCIA jeans collection (#7 grey jeans) at Kinokuniya and could not resist jeans ink as a concept 

:3

 

[Carrau]

Two new colors from Birmingham Pens:  Wood Duck, a saturated medium blue (still not sure of the connection with the bird, possibly blue wing patch), and Smokestack, a saturated rust-burnt orange color.  
https://www.birminghampens.com/products/wood-duck

https://www.birminghampens.com/products/smokestack

[Penguincollector]

  I bought Lamy Pink Cliff yesterday while waiting for my nibmeister appointment.

[inkstainedruth]

On 5/9/2024 at 11:24 PM, Carrau said:

 

Two new colors from Birmingham Pens:  Wood Duck, a saturated medium blue (still not sure of the connection with the bird, possibly blue wing patch), and Smokestack, a saturated rust-burnt orange color.  
https://www.birminghampens.com/products/wood-duck

https://www.birminghampens.com/products/smokestack

I'd be curious to know if anyone could do a side by side between Wood Duck and their old Smithfield Street Bridge Truss Blue --an ink I was NEVER able to get a full bottle of (although I have a couple of sample vials of it.

I keep forgetting to look at the Birmingham Pens website, because I have never quite gotten over them closing their old brick and mortar store in Pittsburgh. 

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Carrau]

1 hour ago, inkstainedruth said:

 

I keep forgetting to look at the Birmingham Pens website, because I have never quite gotten over them closing their old brick and mortar store in Pittsburgh. 

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

Get on their newsletter list- they send an email once or twice a month if they have something new or sale, and some months none at all.  I don’t have Truss Blue, however, the Wood Duck ink I have in front of me resembles the samples shown in Crahptacular’s review of Truss:

 

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/337438-birmingham-–-smithfield-street-bridge-truss-blue/

 

You could always ask the guys at Birmingham to do a comparison if they have some old Truss or sample cards.  They always seem responsive.

 

[inkstainedruth]

That's a good idea.  

When they had the B&M store, I used to stick my nose in there fairly regularly, and go, "So, Nick -- what've you got in new?"  There was one time when I was supposed to be going for a drive with my husband and I had him drop me off at the store for a bit because I wanted to look at that year's al-Star SE (I think it was "Pacific Blue".  Well, I decided I didn't like the color enough, but the store had JUST gotten in a shipment of De Atramentis inks, and I walked out of the store with three bottles of ink and a pink TWSBI 580-AL.  

And of course ended up spending way more than I would have on the al-Star, and my husband was, um, NOT amused.... 

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Carrau]

Their standard bottles look to be 60ml now, for $17 or less during sales.

[A Smug Dill]

On 5/7/2024 at 4:58 AM, A Smug Dill said:

So, fifteen 19ml bottles cost me just over AUD $75, inclusive of tax, shipping, and credit card surcharges.

 

The seller failed to ship the fifteen bottles in that order within the dispatch window prescribed by Taobao, which resulted in fifteen discount coupons (of which a maximum of ten can be used in any single new order) being awarded to my account.

 

(The inks have since been dispatched, not 24 hours after the window closed.)

 

Even though they're only CNY 3 (A$0.63, or US$0.41, at today's exchange rate) each, using ten of them at once makes for a nice little discount.

 

And then, 

On 4/27/2024 at 4:11 AM, A Smug Dill said:

A 12-bottle set of Ostrich's (2017) Flower series shimmer inks in 15ml bottles

 

this didn't work out; the parcel arrived today, but the seller sent me the wrong thing. We agreed on a full refund of the item price, without returning the twelve bottles of identical pink non-shimmer ink I was sent.

 

I was going to use the coupons and the refund against a new order (this time directly with the Ostrich Ink official store on Taobao) for the 12-colour set of the 2018 season of Ostrich Ink's Flower series (which has more usable colours than the 2017 season), and some of Ostrich Ink's chromatographic shading inks as well. But, at the last minute, I changed my mind and ordered ten 30ml bottles of Yunjingtang ink (from a different seller yet again) instead, for about the same total spend after everything has been accounted for.

[BamaAl]

Three bottles of Conklin Israel 75 Diamond Jubilee Collection LE Blue Diamond.

[PithyProlix]

11 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

the 12-colour set of the 2018 season of Ostrich Ink's Flower series (which has more usable colours than the 2017 season)

 

I have this and like it. Besides one Inkvent ink that I got before I figured out my tastes in ink, they are the only shimmer inks I have or ever intend to have. On the whole, the colors are pretty interesting and, from what I could tell from images on the web, seem significantly more interesting than the 2017 ones.

 

11 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

the Ostrich Ink official store on Taobao

 

I've been hoping to get their new (-ish?) iron gall inks but they haven't showed up here. Actually, I can only find them in one store online, which, if I remember correctly, is US-based (which is kind of strange). I got into contact with an Ostrich staff-person who stated he would send them to me directly but it never panned out. Something seems fishy about these iron gall inks ...

[Claes]

I was on the verge of ordering some Diamine "store exclusives"

when I noticed that they could deliver Pelikan's new Golden Lapis.

So I ordered that one as well...

 

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

9 minutes ago, Claes said:

Golden Lapis.

Let us know...

In my Diamine glitter inks are ok, but not breath taking.....sometimes glitter from above...sometimes tilt the paper.

I do have Herbin Stormy Gray or Stormy Night glitter that is viable with no problems...but dark gray/near black and silver or gold works...

 

I really should ask Diamine for three or four extra packages of glitter.