I have a nice wood pen tray from Studio Neat. The two pen version. I’ve used it for a long time at this point.

It usually has my two current fountain pens in it. And it is stained with fountain pen ink all over. And I love it.

I really like objects like that, where it looks cooler because you can see it has been used for its purpose.

I’ve had this book for a year and a half at this point.

It is a big A5 5 year journal. Always fun when you move past the 1 year point and see what you wrote the year before. Still haven’t done too much with the big blank pages on the right side.

That is something I have to get started on sooner rather than later.

There are a few things I look at to if a bag is good / great or just fine or even terrible.

All of them have to do with flexibility.

If you have used a Tom Bihn bag, you have most likely seen the o-rings they have at various places in their bags. I think they are kind of the perfect example of this.

They make it possible to have a key chain at any place where one of these rings are. And you can pick what kind of keychain you prefer. Plus if you break the chain it’s easy to replace.

Other bags I have have just sown some thin rope or other fabric into the bag at a fixed place. Some of them actually work well with this flaw, mostly because they have good taste for the length and placement of it. While others have ones that are more or less useless.

Sometimes I look at the inks I have and wonder: when did I order ink last?

It’s kind of weird how little ink I have bought over the last year and a half, and how much ink I still have left.

After what I can see from my order history in my e-mail I only have bought some Kaweco cartridges plus two bottles in 2025 and 2024; the purple one Lamy did last year and a bottle of Royal Blue Mont Blanc.

At the moment I have one proper eyedropper pen in use. It is a Pocket 66 from Franklin- Christoph. And me, being me, I always fill it all what way up.

This means that the pen has a ridiculous amounts of ink in it. And I doubt I fill it more than 2 or 3 times a year even though I use it multiple times a week.

Love how ridiculous it is.

I used to keep all of my notebooks for a long time.

For the longest time it took up a huge section of my book shelf. Then they lived in a big box. Then at some point I started to throw shit out.

First all the obviously “why the fuck am I keeping this?” Like todo lists and capture stuff. Slowly just getting rid of more or less everything.

There are one thing I keep and that is my common place journal that I write more or less for keeping.

All the rest goes in the bin when I’m done with them.

I haven’t written a lot about inks in a while. Honestly I haven’t bought many inks in the last year, I think it’s like two bottles I’ve bought and I have only tried one of them.

Partly money and partly trying to use up most of what I have before I re-stock.

Here are some of the ink brands I really like and why:

Pilot Iroshizuku

Great colors, well lubricated and you can get them both in big and small bottles. The small bottles aren’t the best designed bottles, but the big one has a groove in the bottom that makes it easy to use more or less all of the ink in them.

Mont Blanc

Their ink bottles are huge, well designed and looks different. And they have some really great colors.

Also not expensive. The last time I checked the prices were around for 60ml.

Robert Oster

I love their inks. There are so much to pick from, not expensive, but their bottles isn’t the best.

Kaweco Cartridges

I have a bunch of Kaweco Sport’s in use (all in metal; also have some plastics I don’t use that much), and because of how useless their converters are I use cartridges in all of them.

The colors are pretty good, but nothing to write home about. But I’m a sucker for their 10-packs of different colors.

I have two Coleto’s, and they are awesome; one with 5 colors and one with 4.

Love having multiple colors available, but also to be able to just jump to the next one if one of them runs out. Plus it’s so much fun to just order a pack of “all the colors” and just pick the first x within reach into a pen.

I guess more than 95% of my pen use is fountain pens and gel pens these days, and have been like that for years.

Most of the time it is fountain pens. But I use gel pens a lot on the go or in meetings.

Over the last year or so my go to have been Pilot Coleto’s (0.5), some Pilot G2 (0.7) and some Pilot Hi-Tec-C (0.4).

Id prefer a Zebra Sarasa to the G2, but sometimes I can’t be bothered to order pens when there isn’t anything else on the shopping list.