My SNC Traveller's Journal: aka The Workhorse

SNC Traveller's Journal ("The Workhorse")

I've been using my Traveller's Journal from the Stamford Notebook Company since July. I've made a couple of modifications along the way, but I'm still using it every day, which for me is a major change! Normally I'm chopping and changing Filofax binder/size/style more frequently than I can keep track of! To still be in the TJ after almost 6 months and with every intention of staying in it, is amazing.

So, what's in there? How have I got it set up? And why is it working so well?

The Cover:
The original cover had a leather thong closure which wound around a button on the front, but the leather was a bit too thick and it didn't feel as if it was closed tight. I fairly quickly changed it so that there is a loop of elastic secured with two buttons to the back of the cover. It's still a bit bulky but it's not annoying me enough to change it! I still love the button on the front and the leather loop just hooks over it and holds everything closed.

My button/elastic loop modification

Back cover - beginning to get a few scars...
but still gorgeous

Originally, the booklets were held in by leather thongs too, but again, they were too thick and bulky so I replaced them with elastics threaded through the holes for the thongs. I currently have four elastics in, though am contemplating putting another two in.

What's in there? How have I got it set up?
Around the first elastic are the zipped pocket (Midori 008) and the card holder (Midori 007). I blogged about both of them here. The zipped pocket holds coins, the card holder unsurprisingly holds cards and the other half of the zipped pocket insert holds paper money and receipts. I originally had these on two separate elastics (as shown in the picture) but now they are both slung around the first one.

The paper is hiding my cards! The planets washi is the edge of the diary.

The zipped pocket insert is great; the card holder holds cards quite loosely to be honest. If the slots faced outwards rather than inwards, I may well have lost cards. They seem to stay in solely because the openings are next to the elastic so there's a limit to how far out the cards can come. Some of this slackness is ameliorated by having more than one card in the slot, but even then, some of them are a little loose.

Next up is a home-made monthly insert for the last few months of 2015. Entirely as expected, I'm not looking at it and it isn't actually helping me to schedule tasks any better than just leafing through the weekly diary and seeing how much is already going on in a week. I'm probably going to take it out because it's taking up an elastic that I want to use for something else!

After that is the week plus notes diary that I made myself from the Moleskine squared cahier. You can see the layout here. (Interestingly, right at the start of that post, I said I would be staying in the Adelphi for the rest of 2015. Uh huh?)
Clipped to the back cover of the diary is a Stamford Notebook Company week + notes insert that they sent me for feedback. They sent me both a week to view (all of 2016 in one booklet) and the week + notes format (2016 split over two booklets). It's not quite the layout that I want as I've got used to the 8 boxes on the left and squares on the right, but it's not bad. I've divided each of the left-hand pages with a vertical line so that I can put appointments on the left and tasks for the day on the right. The right-hand page is a bit free-form as a single lined page but I'll see how I get on with it. I may divide that vertically too. This will move on to an elastic of its own when I ditch the monthly insert, but at the moment, it's held in place by the sweetest clips from OHTO. Who doesn't need a smile?

OHTO smiley slide-clip

OHTO smiley slide-clip

SNC 2016 week + notes diary (cover)

SNC 2016 diary - first page (year diary)

SNC 2016 week + notes diary - interior.
I added the vertical line on the left

Right at the back is another horrible Moleskine cahier which I'm using as a notebook - general jottings, things to look out for, reminders etc.

Why is it working so well?
I've always used a ring-bound planner before and frequently struggled with the size of one - how to be big enough to hold what I wanted but not so heavy it was a pain in the neck to take everywhere with me. The TJ is pretty much the perfect size. I can easily trim A5 inserts if I needed (and have done so with Rhodia cahiers which are ready and waiting in the cupboard for when the horrible Moleskines have been used up). It is also pretty minimalist - the covers are sturdy without being bulky and although I have several booklets and inserts in there, it doesn't feel like a giant lump when I'm out and about. The diary size is large enough that I can probably work just from the week + notes and not need the day-planning that I do in a reporter's notebook (but the extra space in a day in that allows me to time-box).

What will I be using in 2016?
Well, as you'll have seen from my last post, 2016 should be an exciting year. I will also be spending the whole year 'working for myself' rather than working at the university and so (as I am now) in charge of my time to a much greater extent than ever before. Whilst this has many benefits, it's also a responsibility and my planning system will need to work as well as it ever has.
I'm anticipating using the TJ with the week + notes, with longer term plans held in another notebook that can live at home. In conjunction with the TJ, I'll be using the day per page Quo Vadis APB2 (which I reviewed here; then I broke its spine a lot so that it would lie flat and posted pictures here).

I'm honestly quite impressed that this system has been working out so well for me. I genuinely wasn't sure if I would transition to a multiple-booklets system from a ring-bound one very easily. So far, so good though!

Exciting News!

The observant (and even the less observant!) may have noticed that it's a month since I last posted. The main reason for that is that I've been working on another very big project!
Some of you know what this is, but for those of you that don't, my big news is...

My first book is getting published!

[It's not actually the first book I wrote... that will probably never see the light of day. It's not actually the second either, but it's the first of my books to be published!]

It's being published by Matador and a lot of the last month has been taken up with 'stuff' to do with becoming a published author (that still feels weird to say...). Writing the book was almost the easiest thing!

Anyway, I now have an author website (please go and check it out and let me know what you think... www.amandafleet.co.uk); an author Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/AmandaFleetWriter/) and a Twitter account (@amanda_fleet1). I also have a very preliminary entry on the Matador online bookshop, which you can see here.

It's been a bit of a vertical learning curve to be honest, but I feel like I might just about be getting to the point where my feet don't feel like they're about to slide out from underneath me.

Don't worry, I will still be reviewing paper, pens and inks on here, but if you're wanting to share my journey as I move from unpublished author to published author (ooh, that does still sound good!), you can sign up for email updates, over on www.amandafleet.co.uk (there won't be any spam - you'll just get an email when I post something on that website).

Yes, I'm still happy-dancing about it all!

Shimmering Inks

There have been a number of shimmering inks appearing recently. These are inks that have particles of metal dust or other fine particles that will catch the light.
There was the much announced Emerald de Chivor by J Herbin (green with gold) which joined the other inks in their 1670 range - stormy grey (grey with gold), ocean blue (blue with gold) and rouge hematite (red with gold).

Then a few weeks ago, Diamine announced their new Shimmertastic range which has ten different colours - Magical Forest (green with silver), Night Sky (black with silver), Blue Pearl (dark blue with silver), Brandy Dazzle (cognac colour with gold), Purple Pazzazz (purple with gold), Golden sands (deep yellow with gold), Sparkling Shadows (dark grey with gold), Blue Lightning (turquoise with silver), Shimmering Seas (purple-blue with gold) and Red Lustre (red with gold). The picture below is taken from their press release at Goulet Pens (apologies for my watermarking obscuring their logo!).

Anyway, despite already possessing more ink than I can possibly get through in a lifetime, I decided to treat myself to some of these shimmering inks. I've got six in total - three by J Herbin and three by Diamine. I reviewed the three J Herbin inks (see here) but I thought it was high time to do a compare and contrast.

The three J Herbin versions I have are: Emerald de Chivor, Ocean Blue and Stormy Grey. The Diamine inks are: Blue Lightning, Blue Pearl and Night Sky.

Price:
The J Herbin sparkling inks are on sale at Cult Pens at the moment at £14.59 for a 30ml bottle (no affiliation, just a happy customer). The Diamine Shimmertastic inks are £8.95 for a 30ml bottle (also at Cult Pens) - about 60% of the price of the J Herbin inks.

Performance:
I have three pens inked up with shimmering inks but I wanted to compare all six that I have. I have a glass dip pen and so I did the same thing with each ink - shook the bottle for 20 seconds to ensure the sparkly bits were well distributed, dipped the glass pen in to the same depth, then wrote the name of the ink and the ubiquitous The Quick Brown Fox... sentence. All the samples were written on Original Crown Mill white vellum paper. I tried to photograph each sample from above and from the side.
Man, these were hard to photograph!! Not helped by it being a grey day in Scotland, but even so...
Each ink sample is shown photographed from above and then from the side. Click on pictures to enlarge.

I also tried the three pens that are inked up and wrote (pretty much) the same thing:

So, what do I think? Let's take them brand by brand and then ink by ink.

J Herbin v Diamine:
The J Herbin are more expensive than the Diamine and the quality does show through to some degree. I don't know what it is about the J Herbin inks though, but they creep everywhere! I think that they must have a different surface tension to other inks, allowing them to climb surfaces and just generally get everywhere! I'm not the only one who found this - I sent a sample of the Emerald de Chivor to a good friend and he said it got everywhere too! That's not just a disadvantage because you get inky hands when the pens are refilled, but also the inks penetrate through (some) paper quite significantly - even paper that has been pretty resistant with other inks and never shown a problem before. They also have a tendency to feather more - you can see it to some degree in the samples written with pens - and lay down a thicker line.
Diamine ink doesn't seem to have the same property but the disadvantage seems to be that after not using a pen for a while, it is resistant to start writing. The Night Sky in the Sheaffer calligraphy has been fairly problematic with variable feed and drying out, whereas the Ocean Blue (also in a Sheaffer calligraphy) has started first time, each time. There's no getting around it - the J Herbin inks are wet to the point of sopping whereas the Diamines are on the dry side (at least in my pens).

Ink by ink:
1. Ocean Blue
I like the density of the colour but to me, the sparkliness of the ink seems quite limited on the Crown vellum. I would be hard pushed to spot it, even when using a calligraphy nib and a litre of ink is being laid down with each stroke (okay - I exaggerate, but it seems a bit that way!). However, when I reviewed my J Herbin inks a while back, this looked incredibly sparkly! I think all of the inks are paper-dependent for showing off their true values. (The previous reviews used Tomoe River paper)

2. Blue Pearl
Again, a lovely depth to the colour and more sparkle to it than the Ocean Blue on this paper. I also slightly prefer the silver and blue combination as opposed to the gold and blue combo, but that's personal taste.

3. Stormy Grey
In contrast to the Ocean Blue, there's almost too much gold coming through in this one and it makes the grey look yellow. Others may love that, but I'm less of a fan. Unless the light really catches the gold and makes it sparkle (which, I note, it did in my earlier review), the grey can look a little jaundiced.

4. Night Sky
The black and silver combination (with a hint of purple in the right light) is just gorgeous. The downside (but it might be pen-specific) was that when I filled a Sheaffer calligraphy with this, it took an age to get started, then had pretty poor feed, before finally getting into its stride. I then left the pen alone for a day or two and it's dry and reluctant to start. The level of shimmer on it is good and there aren't the feathering and bleed-through issues of the J Herbin.

5. Blue Lightning
I used this to write to a friend and neither of us were overwhelmed by the sparkliness, although both thought that the turquoise was a very pretty colour. However, it might have been the paper that I was using (airmail) as when I wrote on different paper, the silver shimmer was much more evident. It's still subtle, but with the right paper this is a very pretty combination.

6. Emerald de Chivor
I do love this ink! It's a wet to sopping ink but that allows the depth of colour and shading to show through as well as the sparkles. There seems to be more colours in the ink, beyond merely green - blues, reds, yellows - depending on the line thickness and amount of ink laid down. It's probably my favourite of the six sparkling inks, even if it has a tendency to bleed right through normally ink-resistant paper.

In summary:
Both sets of ink are great. The J Herbin are perhaps a slightly better quality - I would like to compare and contrast them with chromatography tests; I think there will be a bigger range of pigments in the J Herbin inks - but for the price, the Diamine are fabulous value. To get the full effect seems to be somewhat paper-dependent, with a glossier paper (such as Clairefontaine, Tomoe River etc.) giving a better result than more matt paper. Emerald de Chivor looks good on any paper but the others do seem to need to be on a paper where the ink sits for a moment, allowing the ink to dry and the gold/silver to end up on the top.

Review of the Conklin Durograph in Forest Green

As a combination of a treat for my birthday and to commemorate me leaving work, I bought myself a Conklin Durograph in Forest Green.

Conklin Durograph in Forest Green

It arrived packaged in a card slip cover containing a navy box.

Box in slip cover

Inside the box was the pen and some instructions and two standard (short) cartridges and the converter. I prefer bottled ink (and have LOTS of bottles of ink) so I screwed the converter in. Yep, you read that right - the converter screws in, rather than pushes in. A couple of reviewers have said that they have found that screw-thread to be tricky and that it doesn't thread properly without being really careful, but I can't say that that was the case for me. It's threaded in okay every time I've used it, so far.

Box

Box open

The exterior of the pen is gorgeous. The body is made of resin with a good depth of colour and pearlescent flecks. At the base of the barrel is a solid black end piece, separated from the rest of the barrel with a chrome trim. The cap has a similar end piece, with Conklin Est. 1898 on it. I suspect that this writing will wear off in time as it is just painted on. Again, the black end piece is separated from the rest of the cap with a chrome trim which is part of a VERY sturdy clip. There is another chrome trim further down the cap which has Conklin Durograph etched on it. The cap screws on.

Cap removed, the body of the pen is black with a fairly substantial looking nib. The stub nib has entirely polished chrome finish; other nibs have a two-tone nib.

Beautiful!

Dismembered and still beautiful!

I'd thought, when I'd been using it, that it was a heavy pen, but when I compared how much each of my pens weigh, I was surprised to find that the Conklin wasn't much heavier than most of my pens at all! Both the TWSBI 540 and the Conklin (unposted) come in at 14g; a Sheaffer calligraphy pen is 12g and the Platinum PTL-5000 is 13g. It is chunkier in its girth though at 12mm for the barrel.

So, never mind what it looks like, how does it write?

Beautifully. There isn't much (if any) spring in the nib, but then, it's chromed steel so why would there be? It lays down a lot of ink (depending on the ink/paper combination, sometimes too much), giving great shading with inks. The nib is smooth and glides easily across paper, without skipping. It 'starts first time' - i.e. if it's not been written with for a few days, it writes immediately. The only disadvantage is that if I'm writing on some papers (like the Leuchtturm A4+ notebook, which seems to encourage LOTS of ink to flow), it can fairly rattle through the reservoir of ink! On other paper (such as Original Crown Mill vellum) it lays down much less ink.

Overall:
I love the pen. It's special because it marks a major change in my life (not just my birthday), it's drop-dead gorgeous (to me, anyway!) and it's also a great pen to write with. Which, after all, is what matters!

Review of the Platinum PTL-5000

I treated myself to this to celebrate something special, but I will tell you more about what that was in the future! For now, let me just review the Platinum PTL-5000.

Platinum PTL-5000

I got this because although I do own quite a lot of fountain pens, I didn't have one with a gold nib. I also don't have thousands of pounds to spend on gold-nibbed fountain pens but this one came in at a very decent price. I got mine from Cult Pens (no affiliation; I paid for it!) and as ever, it arrived the day after ordering. No, I'm not paid by Cult Pens but I have only ever had fantastic service from them and I can recommend them very highly.

The pen arrived with a card slip cover containing the pen box.

slip-cover

plastic box with pen and bits and bobs in

This is an entry level pen and the bulk of the costs have gone into the nib, so it was no great surprise that the box was slightly less than classy. But I don't keep my pens in their original boxes - the boxes go in a cupboard and the pens sit in a pen-tray on my desk, so I don't really care that the box wasn't too special.

Inside the box was the pen, a converter, a cartridge and an instruction booklet.

Contents

Contents with the converter out of its little box

The instruction manual was a little superfluous.

The body and barrel of the pen are glossy black plastic. It feels a little flimsy but that might be because I've been using the Conklin Durograph so much recently and that feels like a real chunky monkey. However, when I weighed the pens, the Conklin was 14g and this Platinum came in at 13g so barely any difference at all. With the cap posted, it weighs 17g, but I never post pens because it always feels as if the weight is too far back in my hand.

uncapped

I have bottles (and bottles!) of ink, so I put the converter in. It has a very positive click/feel when fully engaged. It took a couple of fill-empty-fill-empty routines to get it to fill fully but then it was all primed and ready to go. I filled it with Pelikan Topaz.

The nib I ordered was a medium, but it has to be noted that a Japanese medium is finer than a UK medium. I would describe it as closer to medium-fine. Interestingly, the feed is see-through!

Clear feed

The nib

The gold nib has a bit of  spring to it. Not too 'boingy' but there is a nice amount of give/flex. It felt a tiny bit toothy/scratchy but this may be because it's not a stub nib and that's what I've been writing with for yonks. It may also smooth up with writing. Ink flow was great and there was good shading with the lines. It felt light in my hand, but this may be because it's slimmer than the Conklin (and the TWSBI which are the two I've been using a lot recently).

Writing sample on Original Crown vellum

After doing the test on Original Crown vellum paper, I've used the pen in the Leuchtturm A4+ notebook (reviewed here) and can say that the pen feels much better - a lovely feel to it and nowhere near as toothy as on the Original Crown paper. It's fabulous.

The pen was bought as a work-horse pen -something I can write and write with and not have any issues. I'm sure that it will fulfil this role wonderfully. It wasn't bought as a drop-dead gorgeous, "ooh, isn't it pretty!" pen (and it meets that expectation too).

Review of Leuchtturm A4+ notebook

[Sorry for the absence of posts... who knew 'retiring' was going to be busier than being at work??]

Anyway, LONG overdue is this review of a Leuchtturm A4+ notebook. I've just started using it for writing more notes about the latest book and then realised I hadn't actually reviewed it!

Leuchtturm A4+ notebook

Exterior:
It's larger than A4, measuring 315mm x 225mm (page size = 313mm x 222mm; c.f. A4 = 297mm x 210mm) with a hard cover with leather-effect vinyl. There is a ribbon marker and a vertical elastic closure. There is no pen loop. According to the label, the paper is 100gsm.

Info on the label

Interior:
When you open it, there is space for your name and address. I never fill that in but tend to write what the contents of the notebooks are (e.g. notes on book x). Inevitably, that name/address page is stuck to the page behind, but as that's another sheet of plain paper, it's fine.

Then comes the table of contents. It's got 30 lines per page and 3 pages, so 90 spaces to list the contents of 233 sheets (or more than 2.5 pages per index line). Maybe that will work out for me, but given the enormous size of each page, I'm not sure it will. I would have liked to have seen 4 pages of index rather than 3.

Table of contents layout

Each of the pages in the main part of the book are numbered (1-233) and have a top margin, labelled Date, then a broader line space, then 32 lines, with a margin to the outer edge of the page. The sizes of all of these are in the figure below.

Page layout

detail of the page numbering

I like the prompt to write the date on each page. I'm terrible for forgetting to date things and then years later, looking at them and thinking, "I wonder when I wrote this?" The broader first line/space below the Date margin is handy for titling the page/section.

The side margin hasn't been used yet, but I know I will use it for flagging where notes continue, or where I might need to cross-reference.
The line spacing, at 8.5mm, is a bit broad for me, though it has worked well with the two 1.1mm stub nibbed pens I have. When I've shifted back to a regular medium nib, my writing has looked a bit swamped by the line spacing.

The paper is lovely and thick, and very smooth to write on. With most of my pens, there is no feathering, no bleed-through and no show-through. That said, a couple of my 1.1mm nibs have bled through to the other side, which considering the paper is 100gsm and allegedly 'ink-proof' was a bit disappointing. But, it was an especially wet ink/nib combo and there was no feathering or show-through. Less wet combinations have been absolutely fine. A good friend of mine had said that he'd experienced issues with the paper in that the lines on the page had been almost glossy and been quite ink-resistant with the pen skipping on them but I haven't found that, so maybe we've experienced different batches or they've changed the paper at some point.

The last 8 sheets (pages 219-233) are perforated so that you can remove them. The perforations are very fine and there would be no chance of the paper becoming loose if you didn't want to remove them.

The ribbon marker is okay, but is thin and light and gets a bit drowned by the size of the book. I'm tempted to thread a charm or bead on to it so that it doesn't wriggle back into the book so easily. The elastic closure is fine - firm enough to keep the book closed but no use for trying to trap a pen with. This is a book that stays on my desk though, where there is a glut of pens!

As described on the label, the book lies pretty flat. The pages tend to spring up a bit, but the spine does open to a full 180 degrees.

At the back is a pocket which will take A4 paper, though the gusseting does get in the way a bit. There is a sheet of labels - two lined (92mm x 72mm), two plain (92mm x 72mm) and three for the spine (187mm x 17mm). The sheet says "Please use these stickers for labelling the spine of your Leuchtturm 1917 book when you want to archive it" which feels a bit bossy to me! But that's just me! I tend to write on the spines with a silver pen because I think the stickers look tacky and might peel off.

Other than the usual embossed Leuchtturm1917 on the back, there is no other branding on the outside.

Overall:
I really like this book. The paper is fantastic and the acreage feels wonderful! It also makes me keep my desk a bit tidier, otherwise I can't open the book out! The line-spacing is a little wide for me but I do like the prompt on each page to date the notes. I'll reserve judgement on the index but I sense I will run out of lines in it before I've filled the book.