Pam Alison Knits

October is settling in well, though it still seems as if autumn is only just peeking over the horizon. With temperatures regularly sitting above 20℃ until the past couple of days, I couldn’t bring myself to move into autumnal oranges and reds, so I ended up turning to a selection of blue inks to start the month.

I did use one of my Iroshizuku inks – the misty grey Fuyu-Syogun which turned out to be a very nice combination with the Parker Sonnet. So good, in fact, that I used it almost exclusively for the first week of the month and it ran dry during my Sunday morning journal session. I’m scoring that an A+ and I’m patting myself on the back for going ahead with the nib swap which has made this pen into one I am keen to reach for regularly.

Having emptied the Sonnet, I turned to the Lamy Studio which I had kitted out with Lamy’s own blue-black cartridge. After the muted grey-blue of Fuyu-Syogun, this is a return to a more saturated ink. It’s not as deep as Montblanc’s Midnight Blue, which I am very fond of, but I’m looking forward to taking a while to play with this shade and see what I think of it. It’s a first step towards finding a “perfect” blue-black ink. For a long time this was the blue-black from Cross, but that doesn’t seem to be available at present, so a substitute is called for.

I like to have three pens inked for the month, and my final choice was the good old Kaweco Collection Iguana Blue pocket pen. I thought it would be good to try Graf von Faber-Castell’s Cobalt Blue in this, to provide the brighter pop of colour in my triumvirate of blue inks.

So there we were with three pens inked to begin October. Which suggests there are two intruders in my photographs. These are both carry-overs from last month: my Montblanc Slimline fitted with a cartridge of Montblanc’s Amethyst ink, and the Cross Century II filled with the Montblanc William Shakespeare Velvet Red. I’ve been using the purple ink whilst filling in some standing items in my 2024 diary pages, but I haven’t been using red ink that much of late, though that will hopefully change as we head through the month.

A change of journals is drawing nigh, and I’ve decided I want this to coincide with the lunar eclipse on October 28th. According to my horoscope, this eclipse is meant to play into the theme of personal change which I keep being promised and that seems like the right sort of time to have a break between one journal and the next. Perhaps even an opportunity to revamp my journal style a little. I’ve already decided I will be using up some of my hoard of William Hannah lined paper which is famously friendly towards fountain pen inks and should provide me with a few months of fuss-free writing. I can’t deny that I will miss the bonny notebooks I’ve been using this year, but I can’t resist the lure of a really high-quality paper any longer. And there’s nothing to prevent me buying a sheet of pretty wrapping paper to decorate the card cover of the archive set I’ve put the paper into – the best of both worlds.