Diamine Inkvent - Advent Calendar madness!

[Ashenden]

I'll be doing a daily post to this thread with the current Diamine Inkvent ink advent calendar offering. If you didn't get a calendar and want to see what's in it, check back every day here and you can get a little preview, all done in some pretty crummy calligraphy.  I have posted these for the past three years on the r/fountainpens subReddit but I'm moving to Fountain Pen Network this year.

 

Some short background info on my materials and process:

The brush swatches are done with an Escoda #6 watercolor brush on Col-o-ring swatch cards. The pens I use for the calligraphy are Pilot Parallel in 6.0 and 1.5 line widths. The paper is just whatever the next page is in my current Tomoe River journal, and I'm almost done with this journal so paper may be switching out halfway through. The gold accents are done with a DecoColor liquid gold pen, but I do wish the tip of this was much more fine as it doesn't get as precise as I'd like, even though these are supposed to be quick 20 minute drawings. The Parallel is my favorite pen—I have 24 of them so I can keep many colors inked up at once and in different line weights. I use these all the time for calligraphy and art, although I have to confess (and you can see here) my calligraphy skills are a bit rusty after nearly a year of no practice, so I'm hoping 25 days of this will get it back into shape. 

 

I do similar calligraphy on the envelopes I send to penpals. I like receiving fancy stuff in the mail so I figure some of them do, too.

I also do several other advent calendars this time of year; most notably, the WINE CALENDAR... heck yeah! I am also doing the Hobbii crochet calendar, one project for each of four weeks leading up to Christmas, and a fun little votive candle calendar that covers 12 days. 

 

Today of the Inkvent is Day 1, Baltic Breeze. This one is a lovely shimmer ink, but not too many details for those of you who haven't opened yours yet. Hopefully I have "spoiler alerted" this properly...

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

[LizEF]

Beautiful, @Ashenden!  And my, what a fine looking kitty you have. (But clearly kitty wants to know where the treatvent is!)

[yazeh]

@Ashenden gorgeous calligraphy. How can you improve upon that?  

And what an elegant kitty with such lovely tie 😸

Looking forward to day 2  

[Sailor Kenshin]

Same here!

[Mechanical]

@Ashenden, beautiful design and execution!  Diamine should really be hiring you to make their inks look so appealing. 🙂

[Ashenden]

Day 2! Inkvent advent calendar madness is in full swing!

 

Today’s ink is not my favorite, but it’s alright. I guess it’s not intense enough for me; I’m not crazy about light/watery ink colors, although I’m sure I’ll eventually find a use for this. Getting this calendar puts me well over 300 ink colors but I don’t think I have one quite like this already, so that’s at least good.

 

I busted open the Hobbii crochet calendar for the first week, and come to find out it’s Tunisian crochet, which I do NOT know how to do. So I’m having a fun time with a new skill and by the time I’m done with the beanie I’m supposed to be making, I’ll have crocheted the entire thing twice with all the frogging and redos I’ve gone through. It’s looking pretty good though after those few false starts, and I can confidently say I’m getting the hang of it. 

 

Tonight’s wine is a merlot/cab/syrah blend and it’s pretty good. Not nearly enough of it, though

 

I MISS the chocolate calendar we had last year! No sweets for us this go-around.

 

Spoiler alert for the ink…

 

Spoiler

 

 

[AmandaW]

Wilted Rose... gorgeous. I would order when it’s out in proper bottles.

 

Thankyou for the calligraphy.

[Sailor Kenshin]

@Ashenden, tunisian crochet is pretty EZ if you have the hook.  It's just your regular picking up loops, then hooking them off…but loops stay on the hook.   Any video or illo will get it started.

 

ps: totally read this as hobbit….

[inkstainedruth]

On 12/2/2024 at 9:29 AM, LizEF said:

And my, what a fine looking kitty you have. (But clearly kitty wants to know where the treatvent is!)

@Ashenden -- Thank you for doing this.  Day One, Baltic Breeze, has definitely piqued my interest.  Day Two?  Kinda reminds me of a sample I got a number of years ago of Noodler's Black Swan in English Roses (which, like "Wilted Rose" is a little too brown leaning a red/pink (or too red leaning a brown) for my taste.

But thanks for doing this!  And I'm looking forward to the rest of this year's Inkvent reviews.  

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Anne-Sophie]

 

Thank you, thank you, I can't wait for the next posts!

 

Beautiful works of art! How ling does it take you to make a page?

[PithyProlix]

So far, the first two days look like big YESes for me. Thanks for showing them to us! So beautifully done!

[Ashenden]

Inkvent Calendar Madness, Day 3!

 

This one's a little late. I had my two swallows of Advent calendar wine and that wasn't enough, so I broke into the eggnog. By bedtime I wasn't even thinking about ink. Well, here ya go, 12 hours late. You're gonna get two today, hopefully, but day four will post a little bit later.

 

SPOILER ALERT: The spoiler button seems to be gone. It was here for the past few days but I don't see it any more. So If you don't wanna know what today's ink is quite yet, don't scroll any further.

 

Now on to the ink. This is a great, bright green ink. It reminds me a lot of Diamine's Magical Forest, but it's a bit different shade. There's a nice silver shimmer in it and a lot of it, so it's pretty rich. The ink type is listed as "Star Bright". I think that may be a new thing for them this year as I don't recall this type being in any previous calendar. They've had Standard, Shimmer, Scented, and Chameleon. This ink is really loaded with shimmer, so maybe that's what the qualifier is for Star Bright? Anyway, it's a gem. It flows nicely on my Tomoe River paper. And it looks great with the gold accents! 

 

I found a silver version of my DecoColor pen which also would have looked great with this ink. It's on order and hopefully it will make it into future calendar submissions.

 

For those of you invested in my Hobbii  Advent calendar Tunisian crochet attempt, it's actually going pretty good. It's a beanie seamed up the back, so it's worked in rows and not in the round. I've got one row a bit on the loose side, but overall, I think my tension is OK, the edges are straight, and I'm getting the hang of holding all the work on the needles. Although, I did order a set of Clover Tunisian crochet hooks with swivel cords because the cords on my current set are stationary and DRIVING ME NUTS. Stay tuned for further progress!

 

 

[Ashenden]

11 hours ago, Anne-Sophie said:

 

Thank you, thank you, I can't wait for the next posts!

 

Beautiful works of art! How ling does it take you to make a page?

 

Hi there! Well, it depends. On a good day, about 20-30 minutes. I start with a quick practice of the main title of the ink. If that goes well, I use it as a template for the final. If it doesn't go well, I get my scissors out and cut and rearrange letters and words until I like how they look, then make a new template out of that. Fountain-pen-ink-friendly tracing paper is invaluable here, as well as a heat gun to keep the letters dry. I'm left-handed so I have to dry every few letters or it would take forever to finish. Once the main name is done, the bounding box and pattern/illustrations around the main title are just freeform. I use a ruler and a mechanical pencil to do some base guidelines then it's kind of just up to my imagination after that.

 

 

 

[Sailor Kenshin]

Your hat is admirably done!  👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
 

And what was Santa baking?