Lamy's Dark Lilac release has caused a pretty significant stir lately, to the point that somehow it ended up getting a story on the New York Times. Granted, the Times publishes many stories that hardly qualify as news or factual information, but regardless, "limited edition fountain pen ink controversy makes it onto national news publication" is not something I had on my 2024 Bingo card.
Taking the ink of the hour for a spin in my journal
As with most internet controversies, I'm not sure how much of the controversy is real and how much of it is random people talking about controversy. (Now I'm one of those random people!)
The context is this: Dark Lilac was a wildly popular limited edition ink released in 2016. Lamy recently announced that they were going to add it to their permanent lineup, but with the caveat that the color would be different due to pigment sourcing issues. Goulet Pens has some comparison swatches.
I'm no chemist, but I am vaguely aware that pigment selection for products like makeup, soap, and (of course) ink is a pretty exact science because the pigment needs to play well with everything else that goes into the formulation. I'm not surprised that Lamy couldn't get an exact match for the original color, and I respect that they 1. disclosed that and 2. made the rerelease permanent instead of being sneaky about it.
I bought this new edition of Dark Lilac because I wasn't even using fountain pens when at the time of the first release, and I don't have any purple ink. Comparisons to the old edition aside, Dark Lilac 2.0 is great!
I love tiny palettes. They're the type of thing that I see and swear I'm going to do [x] (paint) more because I have [y] (a tiny paint palette). I thought really hard about getting a fancy small wooden palette (as seen in this tiny palette mega review by Leslie Stroz), but decided against it in favor of engineering one out of a mint tin. I also love putting random shit in mint tins. I already keep my small cross stitching projects in one (you would be shocked at the amount of embroidery floss you can stuff into one Altoids tin).
A few years ago, I got one of those carts everyone and their mom seems to have. I don't use it as a cart 99% of the time, but it's easier to move around than a shelf if I do need to move it. I recently got the impulse to consolidate most of my art supplies onto it for easy access, so I am here to share the results of that organization with you, the audience.
I got the cart on sale from a Store that sells Containers, but pretty much everyone is selling them nowadays. I didn't bedazzle or accessorize my cart at all, but there are also a bunch of different attachments and other junk you can hang off of your cart for maximum organization. Or you can just be like me and stuff everything in there regardless of whether it wants to be stuffed.
I bought a Traveler's Notebook cover last year, mainly because they released an olive edition and I needed it. I liked the idea of a modular notebook, though, so I swore I would figure out how to use it. I continued liking the idea and doing absolutely nothing else with it for 6 months. But it's a new year with a corresponding new me, so here I am! Using it!
I will freely admit to dropping about 50 bucks on the cover and having no regrets about it at all, but a lot of the other stuff that Traveler's Company sells is overpriced. Some of their accessories are fine things that someone less frugal would probably be happy with, but others are garbage. I don't want to play roulette with garbage, so I've hacked together the stuff I have inside my notebook with some success.
