I’ve been doing adult coloring on and off for a couple of years at this point. Plus my two year old loves to play with pencils. And we have tried a bunch of different color pencil sets.

I have tried cheap, expensive and very expensive. And here is a numbered list of what I want from color pencils:

1. Sharpen them with the same gear I use to sharpen my regular pencils
2. Easy to buy them
3. As inexpensive as possible

Of all the shit I’ve tried, the most consistent in line with my wish list is the Blackwing color pencils.

I’m on my second bottle of this ink. I think that says a lot. There are very few inks I have bought it again after the first bottle ran out.

The other one is the black Iroshizuku ink; mostly because I like to have a bottle of black ink.

This was also the first Robert Oyster ink I got. He makes some really cool inks. Not loving the bottles though. And in my experience they are like 95% of what I get from Iroshizuku.

The color is basically something that looks very similar to the orange you see on The Pen Addict. I like it a lot, and it is the ink I’ve kept permanent in my FC Pocket 66 since I got the second bottle.

I was looking for my old cover a while back I couldn’t find it. So I ordered a new one. The big version. Also thinking about getting the small one for pocket sized stuff.

I’m on my second Day Free refill in my Travelers Notebook.

I’ve also added a dated 6 month refill to it. This is most likely just a pre-cursor to me ordering a Hobonichi Cousin A5.

The dated refill has a two page spread with all the days of the week, that I use for high level planning my week. Like when I’m going into the office, when I’m going to the gym and if I have any spare time appointments. Makes it much easier to plan my week in 2 minutes than with digital calendars.

The Day Free is more used for mid level task management. And I have a lined refill for a common place journal style writing.

I was ordering another bottle of the Pen Addict orange and decided to throw in a pack of the Write Notepads he had in The Pen Addict Shop.

Write notepads have been on my list of stuff to check out for a very long time. But I’ve never pulled the trigger because they’re mostly available on their own store, so it takes more of an effort to order it than all the stuff in stock at JetPens and similar.

Anyways.

I like these notebooks. The paper is awesome, and they have a very high quality feel. They’re also a lot thicker than the typical Field Notes format. Not sure how I like that yet.

But if I can get behind the new thiccness I’ll probably start using them as my new go to for pocket notebooks.

The standard size for a pack of pencils these days is a box of 12. You can get some as singles but that is a surprisingly small section of the market.

At the time of writing I have over 50 pencils I haven’t started using yet. Most likely closer to 60. I’ll guess this is like 2-3 years of pencils at my current pace.

In the same way I’d love to see smaller bottles of ink, I’d also love to see smaller boxes of pencils, like 4 or 6 instead of 12 as a industry standard. Would be great for everyone that love to try things out but don’t want to build up a huge collection of pencils.

Back in the early days I used Hobonichi Techo’s for a couple of years. I think it was 2015 and 2016, if I remember correctly.

Then midway into the second one I gave up on them. Mostly because the dry time was a struggle. And that the format didn’t really do anything for me.

When I look back at it I probably was doing some bullet journal like thingy without knowing it.

These days I have been considering them again. Not the techo, but the A5 cousin.

How the fuck did I end up here?

Up until my recent switch in my nib preferences all of my or most of my pens was wet broads.

Long story short: I’m going on a plan in August and decided to see if I could find a decent gel pen at a local store with a finer nib to bring with me. And the only thing I could find at the one larger store I went to was this one.

The really fucked up thing is that I really like it. It is kind of funny because the last time I tried this pen I hated it so much that I threw it in a bin within 10 minutes of buying it. So I guess I’m going to order a bunch of finer point gel ink pens from JetPens soon.

Travelers notebooks is this awesome covers with all kinds of cool accessories and stuff to fill them with. They come in two formats, one that is like a skinny A5 and one that is kind of like Field Notes.

I used to use them for a long time as my go to notebook for everything. I used to fill them with one lined notebook for writing, one dotted for managing tasks and such. I used to like it a lot. It was very compact and awesome.

As I discovered local stores in Norway that let me order Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, but not Travelers refills I slowly moved away from the system.

The standard one can fit up to three refills.

There are also tons of third party covers that can do more. Plus a lot of accessories to make it your own.

I’m seriously considering moving a bunch of my stuff back over to this system.

I have at various times tried to use paper planners as my only calendar. That have never really worked out, and I have in time found a place for them that works for me.

Anyways. The first time I tried this it was the Hobonichi Techo, the second time I used this. It lasted for like 3 or 4 months. It is a solid planner, if you can deal with the Field Notes paper.

One thing I always like in a planner is a two page week spread. And the Field Notes 56 week planner had a interesting take on it. Not the one that have worked the best for me, but interesting non the less. They split the page into 6, and the last of the 5 into two, leaving a large section for the week days and two smaller for Saturday and Sunday.