Fountain Pens

July Daily Inks, Sailor + Robert Oster

For July I went with a theme for my Daily Ink Samples for the first time. I saw a post about an ink that was named after a state and I was like, hmmmm. July 4th, could do USA themed. Now I will say this – I am NOT thrilled with the USA in general right now. But, if I could find 31 inks that were state related, then. Thought it might be interesting. 

I could only find 24 inks from Sailor that had state names, so I filled in with another 7 from a Robert Oster series “Cities of America.” And I ordered the states alphabetically and put in the cities with the state if there was one, or where a state would be if it was missing. 

Sailor Ink has never given me any trouble, and this set of samples followed suit. Robert Oster was a manufacturer I did samples from earlier in the year, so it was nice to have some more from them. There was only one shimmer ink in this pack – and it was from Robert Oster – which made me realize I don’t know if Sailor even makes shimmer inks! So I will be going to look into that at some point! 

There were a lot of browns. I do not like the color brown. These were…nice browns. For that color. I suppose. But when the Georgia ink is brown instead of a peach for like Georgia peach, I got grumpy. Which is not the inks fault, but still!

A page from a notebook with a grey grid. At the top it is labeled “July Daily Inks, Sailor + Robert Oster “Cities of America” (when noted). The ink names are listed in a numbered column, and on each line is a dot of that ink. The inks are listed below the photo.
The tracking page I use to list all of the ink names and a dot of that inks color next to the name.

Sailor:

  • Alaska
  • Arizona
  • California
  • (Robert Oster) Napa
  • Colorado 
  • Delaware
  • Florida
  • (Robert Oster) Miami
  • Georgia 
  • Idaho
  • Illinois
  • (Robert Oster) Chicago
  • Indiana
  • (Robert Oster) Kansas City
  • Louisiana
  • Maryland 
  • Michigan
  • New York
  • (Robert Oster) New York City
  • New Jersey
  • (Robert Oster) Las Vegas
  • Oklahoma
  • (Robert Oster) Oklahoma City
  • Oregon
  • Pennsylvania
  • South Dakota
  • Texas
  • Vermont
  • Virginia
  • Washington
  • Wisconsin
31 Ink Sample Cards in two columns. There are a variety of colors. Each sample card has a swatch of color at the top, a stamp of a fountain pen nib, a puddle of ink, the name of the ink manufacturer, the name of the ink, and “xxxooossssssssss.” There is a label on the bottom left, 22JulVent-#, and on the side it is labeled Standard.
31 Ink Sample Cards, in two columns.

Then things got weird! I decided to put all of the inks on a US Map – but the paper was regular printer paper, and the inks did not go down great. A lot of the inks bleed and made the soot sprites or candy stars look kind of creepy. But Aaron’s whole face lit up when he saw this – worth it.

A plain and unlabeled US map printed in black on white paper. There are soot sprites in all of the different ink colors from Sailor. And there are candy stars of the different Robert Oster inks. The soot sprites are adorable.
US map populated by different color soot sprites and candy stars.

Not sure I am going to theme my Daily Ink Samples again…I might just stick to a single manufacturer per month -for as long as I can. We shall see!