Hullo folks, this one is being posted suuuuper late because February was a ROUGH month in our house. Lotsa meltdowns, broke my favorite fountain pen (Magic Green), lotsa possible exposure to covid, all kinds of fun stressful things. But never mind! Let’s talk pens. And inks. Fun stuff for real real.

Pen/Ink Palette:
My theme for February was our wedding colors, purple and green because I do not like reds and pinks so when I think of love, I think of those colors! I did include one pink but it was more of a peach so, cheated a little bit.

Favorite:
I had a tie in favorites this month. Both of these pens worked so well with the inks in them – and NEITHER ink was a shimmer! Yeah, surprised me too. I had Akkerman 13 Simplisties in the London Pen Co. pen, and PenBBS #506 Grain Rain in the Sailor. They were very soothing to write with which I definitely needed the latter half of the month. Very reluctant to put these away when the ink ran out!

Least Favorite:
I am going to write about the Magic Green drama in another post, so I’ll put a different pen in this spot.
There were actually a couple of pen combos I was having trouble with this month, I really need to stop buying vacuum pens for example. But the least favorite I settled on was a Mad Science Pen Company pen with a 1.1 stub nib and Diamine Inkvent 2022 Alpine. Pen worked great, fine performance flow wise. But the ink was basically black on most of the papers I used it with. Very very faint green in the right light. Silver sheen was pretty visible, but I found the whole thing kind of unappealing. So I think I found one of the few shimmers that looks WORSE in a broad nib! I will do a comparison. Some day.

Learned:
Uhm. I think the biggest thing I learned was really WHY the Magic Green pen was magic for me. Oh and that I really do not like vacuum pens. I have 3. I think I am done at this point haha. Oh and the Osprey nib was annoying – I don’t think flexible nibs are for me. Two years in a row I had a very disappointing February pen/ink experience. Ah well. Third years the charm right?

Daily Samples:
I forget exactly why I picked up so many PenBBS samples but. I did. So another month of PenBBS samples! I do like how these inks behave overall, so this was a nice, chill, reliable start to my day!

Favorite:
Honestly, I was mostly just enjoying how the ink performed. But wasn’t too excited about the colors this month. I did enjoy the weird of #408 Xiamen on the 11th. You can kind of see it in the photo how the ink sort of shades, it’s mostly a pastel blue but there are brief and very faint hints of pink. It’s too light to write with but I bet the chromatography of it is going to be SUPER fun. Whenever I get into that.

Least Favorite:
No real strong feelings for the daily samples this month so I guess I’ll go with #387 Mark Twain because it ended up being a pretty basic black. I don’t think I have ever used a black ink. Nor will I!

Learned:
I should probably stop just buying sets of ink to get all of the numbers. Maybe. But it is easier. I am not sure how much longer I’ll end up doing daily samples, which I realized this month. I still find it soothing, and I still appreciate including it in my daily routine. And I DID just start a year long planner for this haha. I probably won’t abandon this until I find something else to replace it, but I will be building some fairly odd palettes in future, often augmented by the Subscriptions samples.

Subscription Samples:
Nope! I got Truphae and Ink Flight but I did NOT sample them in February because for my March Daily Samples, I only had 20 inks. And 12 samples fills in the last 11 needed nicely.

So that’s it. I was incredibly focused on March starting for a couple of reasons – I am trying out planner specific stickers in March from HubmanChubgirl for one, which could be fun – and for another thing, it would be a brand new month to hopefully not go horribly. Also, one month closer to my birthday, yay!
Thank you for your patience my delightful readers!