Paper Haul from St. Paul

Some little lights reflecting off the nib in the afternoon sun. Ink is Colorverse Arrakoth.

I went on a little adventure this week. I packed a thermos of English Breakfast Tea and set out south on Interstate 35 from the frozen Northland to the slightly less frozen Twin Cities. My mission was simply to get out of town for the day and to make a return visit to a little shop I learned about in November.

Wet Paint is an art supply store in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was introduced to this shop during last year’s Pelikan Hub which was hosted by @Doodlesdamari in their classroom area (Thanks Mari and everyone else who was there last November, it was awesome to be in a room with pen people!). While they were a traditional art store for a long time, Wet Paint is starting to branch out into fountain pens and writing papers - and I acted like a kid in a candy store. I probably spent an inappropriate amount of time checking out all of the paper that they had available, haha! (And was having so much fun looking that I didn’t take a single picture of the store…). They are very close to the Como Zoo and the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory and definitely worth a visit if in the area.

And while they had a lot of notebooks that I was familiar with, they had a few that I haven’t tried before. In order to keep to the budget I’d set I didn’t buy everything I wanted, but I got a few new things to play with.

Kokuyo Perpanep Tsuru Tsuru grid notebook

I grabbed the last of the paper types from the Kokuyo Perpanep collection. The tsuru tsuru is supposed to be the smoothest of the group. It’s definitely a little slippery, in some spots it felt like my pen was getting away from me. The grid is 4 mm, which is a nice size, I wish there were a few more notebooks out there utilizing it. Of the three, I think my favorite is still the toothier zara zara, but I’m looking forward to putting this slightly shiny paper through its paces.

Rollbahn A5 Grid notepad

So, I thought this one was German when I picked it up. It has a very German sounding name and German words on the cover. It’s actually made by Delfonics though, a Japanese company and made in Japan. I ended up tearing up the cover a little bit so that I could fold the cover completely over the back, so the staples aren’t usually exposed. It’s a really warm color paper, almost yellow with a little bit of tooth. It has grid on only one side - clearly designed to stay on the pad and then be torn off. The perforations at the top make that really easy to do. I’ve been using this pad a lot at the office and it shows off ink pretty well, it really pulls out warm tones in the colors.

Mnemosyne 188 A5 notepad

Despite being around this brand of paper more than once, I’ve never actually used it extensively myself. Another paper brand from Japan, this pad has grid notebook paper on one side with space at the top for titles and dates. It’s a very smooth paper and has pretty much no ghosting with the inks I was using. It seems like a really solid one to play with. I’ll probably make a few junk journals with this one and the Rollbahn for my TN which really helps get a good perspective.

Nakabayashi Logical Prime B5 Notebook

One more from Japan (I had an unintentional theme with this notebook haul), I’d seen these popping up in different shops online and wanted to give it a try. There is minimal ghosting with this paper and it’s definitely thinner than the other three that I got. This paper is lined with the little guidelines around the page that allow it to be easy to lay down a ruler and break up the page for different types of note-taking and for being conscious of letter height. This size and design will be great for when I really need to spread out with my ideas.

Other Goodies

I picked up another A6 Itoya Oasis Notebook which has a similar page layout to the Logical Prime.

I bought one of these at Atlas Stationers on my trip to Chicago last spring and really enjoyed it. I was happy to see them again. I also grabbed a small size wire-bound Clairefontaine notebook for a writing project I want to do in April (stay tuned!). I also picked up a few more Ferris Wheel Press inks - a bottle of Madam Mulberry, and another ink charger set with pumpkin patch, tanzanite sky, and jelly bean blue.

Thanks to the Baltimore Pen Show walkthroughs I checked out Sugar Turtle Studio on Etsy and they have the cutest stuff! Now I just have to decide where to put these two stickers.

Currently Inked

Diamine Olive Swirl Inkvent 2022 - Kaweco Sport Mellow Blue B - I did a partial refill of this ink because I was enjoying it so much. Olive green ink is hitting that spring vibe without being too overwhelmingly green. I love the contrast with the copper/green chameleon shimmer as well.

Ferris Wheel Press The Fluttering Heart - Kaweco Sport Macchiato 1.9 - I think I’ll be able to squeeze out the final week of this month with this ink. It’s been growing on me from when I first received it. Solidly in the pink range that I like.

Ferris Wheel Press Grand Central Skies - Kaweco Liliput copper 14K B - Another ink with a refill this week. It’s just so fun and cheerful. With an extra few inches of snow on the ground last week, I am channeling spring with this color right now.

Diamine Polar Glow Inkvent 2019 - Kaweco Liliput fireblue 14K M ‘journaler’ - I was looking for a sheener to test out my new papers with and decided to tap this one from the 2019 Diamine Inkvent Calendar. It’s a medium blue with a pink sheen on most papers. A really wet writer and a great choice for story scribbling.