Ink Review: Sailor Jentle Apricot

Over the past two weeks I've had two pens inked up with Sailor Jentle Inks.  My Lamy 2000 (EF Nib) has been loaded up with Epinard, and my Sheaffer Legacy Heritage (one of my personal favorite pens) has been loaded up with Apricot. 

A great combination for annotating documents:  Sheaffer Legacy Heritage with Mike Masuyama-tuned EF Nib, loaded with Sailor Jentle Apricot Ink.

Orange ink is new to me.  I definitely have a think for reds in all shades, particularly darker wine-colored reds like Montblanc Hitchcock (my favorite red ink of all time), Visconti Burgundy, and Franklin-Christoph Syrah Syrah.  I decided to try orange fountain pen ink after discovering the Pilot Hi-Tec-C gel pens, which have outstanding shades of both orange and apricot, and realizing that I like to be able to distinguish between different types/categories of annotations, especially when I'm editing a lengthy document such as a 100+ page legal brief.  But I digress....

This scan makes the ink color appear slightly more red than it is in real life.  The pictures I've taken and posted below in the gallery or truer reproductions of the actual color. 

Apricot is extremely well behaved and low-maintenance for such a bold-colored ink.  It doesn't feather much, even on the cheapest paper, and bleedthrough is minimal.  So far, I've not had any difficulty cleaning the ink out of any of my pens.  One thing that distinguishes this ink from other popular orange inks such as Noodler's Apache Sunset, and even Iroshizuku Yu-Yake, is the relative lack of shading.  Some shading is there, especially in a wetter nib, but if its highly visible shading you're looking for, Apache Sunset wins that battle hands down. 

Travel Edition: The Gentleman Hits the Road

Just a quick post for the beginning of the week, since I've been traveling since Thursday (and, at least for the time being, am stranded in the airport.  What pens/stationery/writing equipment do you all take on the road?  For this particular trip, I've chosen my "non-fountain pens of choice."  If I'm going on a particularly long vacation or business trip, where I might be doing a lot of journaling or writing, I will take one or two fountain pens, but since this was a long weekend where not much writing was going to get done, I went with convenience.  

Four of my preferred "road pens"

Four of my preferred "road pens"

So, from left to right, the Sakura Pigma Micron 02 (.3mm); Hi-Tec-C Coleto Lumio in Matte Black; Retro 51 Tornado Stealth with the .7mm black refill; and the TiPen with a 0.4mm Blue-Black Hi-Tec-C refill.  The Coleto has four .4mm refills in black, purple, apricot, and orange.  I tucked these into my Nock Co. Hightower with a ruled kraft paper Field Notes and four or five Exacompta index cards and I was ready for pretty much anything:  

So far, I think the Hightower has been the favorite of my Nock Co. cases.  I received all of them, but this is my favorite so far.  Reviews forthcoming.

I'm comfortable with this as my "travel rig" for now.  I've been experimenting with various setups on recent business trips and nearly always have come home concluding that I've carried too much stuff that never gets used and just bulks up my bag.  We'll see where this goes. . . . 

 

Ink Review: Sailor Epinard

This is a review for one of my "professional inks," that I regularly use at the office, in court, or anywhere else that I don't want to turn heads.  Not that this ink won't turn the head of anyone who's paying attention--it's a great color.  I apparently just missed out on the Montblanc British Racing Green ink by entering this hobby in 2010, just as that ink was discontinued.  People often suggest that Epinard is a comparable ink and fair substitute, along with Diamine Green Black, Diamine Evergreen, and Noodler's Zhivago.  Having never tried the original, I can't give an opinion.  What I can say is that this ink more than stands on its own. 

For the non-Francophones, "Epinard" is the French word for spinach.  It's a fair descriptor.  Although there's a good bit of black in the green, you're still writing with green ink.  This ink is loaded into my Lamy 2000 with an EF Nib.  A very professional ink in a professional pen.

What makes this ink great for work is the fact that like many Sailor inks, it's incredibly well-behaved on cheap copy paper.  If your employer, like mine, buys whatever it can get the most of for the least amount of money, and you absolutely must use a fountain pen at work, Sailor Jentle Ink is a pretty safe bet.  I have bottles of Epinard, Apricot, Grenade, and the ultimate cheap-paper ink, the pigmented nano-black.  All are excellent.  

Rumor is that Sailor is releasing a new range of ink this summer.  One of the colors among them is an even darker green-black, which is on my list.  Stay tuned.  And if anyone wants to send me a sample/full bottle of the British Racing Green, feel free to reach out . . . . :) 

Kickstarter Lawsuit Filed As Backer Fails to Deliver

As some of you might know, when I'm not writing here I spend my days--and some of my nights--as an attorney, and I couldn't help but post this when it landed in my inbox yesterday.  Apparently, Bob Ferguson, the Washington State Attorney General, has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the Kickstarter card game, Asylum, for failing to deliver a finished product to his 810 backers who had provided him with $25,000 in funding.  35 of those backers lived in Washington State.  This unprecedented development certainly came as interesting news to me, as we pen enthusiasts are known to back a Kickstarter project or two, often with little to no assurance of whether or not we are paying for a project that will never deliver, or whether we will end up paying $50 for a "custom-designed" product that the backer purchased in China for $0.89.  The question has been asked in more than one forum, what recourse do we have against obvious fraudsters, when there's no real economic incentive to sue when you're out of pocket less than $100?  Apparently some state attorney generals are listening to consumer concerns, and it merits watching whether or not this becomes a trend.       

Some other links and stories:

Gamer Rant, Kickstarter Lawsuit May Set Precedent on Future Successful Campaigns

Gizmodo, The Government is Finally Trying to Make Kickstarter Scammers Pay

 

Ink Review: Franklin-Christoph Syrah Syrah

This is the second of two reviews of Franklin-Christoph's bottled ink that I picked up at last month's Atlanta pen show.  This one is their red color, "Syrah Syrah," which as you might expect is a burgundy wine-colored ink.  Like the Olde Emerald, it offers shading galore, especially in a stub nib like this 1.1mm Masuyama on my Sheaffer Legacy Heritage.

Excellent shading, but if I had one gripe, it's that the ink is fairly watery and sometimes railroads on slicker paper.  This is the same Exacompta Index card stock that I use for all my reviews.  This is a smallish price to pay, however, for a red ink that's as easy to clean out of a pen as this one.

This ink has good flow, especially for a red.  In my experience, red inks sometimes get crusty around the nib and are hard starters.  I've not had that issue here.  There's no bleed through or feathering on good paper like my Exacompta card stock.  On a Doane legal pad, there was some bleed-through, as you'd expect from a stub nib and an ink this wet, but hardly any feathering so my pen was still usable.  I've not used it in a fine or extra fine yet, which are my day-to-day users, so I may post an update as it makes its way through the rotation.