Summer’s Sunburned Inks
Humans aren’t the only ones who have summertime adventures in the sun. Read all about more than a dozen very sunburned fountain inks and their UV adventures.
Drippy Musings
Ink Reviews
29 Ink Reviews posts. Inks under the sun and the pH meter: the UV fade tests that leave bottles on a windowsill for a year, the pH readings that explain why some inks eat sacs, and which inks are safe in a vintage pen. Twenty-nine posts, the sunburned-inks series among them.
Inktober Wrapping Up Our Noodler’s Ink Tests
I can barely draw a stick figure, so for our contribution to Inktober, I thought I would share the last of the results from our deep dive into testing Noodler’s Inks. These are the final 22 inks from our big haul several years ago.
Examining Noodler’s Ink Part III
A new year means a new look at different inks. As such, here are 11 more inks by the vaunted Noodler’s brand. We test 11 more inks by Noodler’s Inks to see how well they handle UV light in a sunny window and to see how well they test with our pH meter. Today’s inks…
Examining Noodler’s Ink Part II
For your writing pleasure, we have tested 10 more Noodler’s-brand inks. In Part I we delved into the various controversies, merits and problems with Noodler’s Ink. To read about that, please click on the Part I link. 10 Noodler’s inks are on display here as a color-fast testing measure. The sheet on the left has…
Examining Noodler’s Ink Part 1
The one ink brand everyone is always talking about is Noodler’s Inks. People either love it or hate it. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground. As such, we want to add our two cents to this conversation, and we surprised ourselves with our tests and findings. Controversy seems to follow in…
Loose Ends Ink Test
While wrapping up our ink tests in 2021, we had a bunch of loose bottles of ink that we tested on the same pieces of Rhodia paper to save paper and space. I left these test samples in the window for six months, and Dawn and I calibrated and tested the pH on these samples…
De Atramentis Starts Rich and Fades
Happy New Year! Let’s start the year right with a fresh look at some lesser known inks. De Atramentis is the Latin word for ink. The company is based in Germany. It specializes in a series of specialty inks, including perfumed inks. We obtained 13 colors from a collection and decided to test them with…
Caran D’Ache Chromatics Face the UV-pH Challenge
Swiss pen maker Caran D’Ache is most famous for its precision engineering on its line of ballpoint pens. They make nice fountain pens, too, but it is the company’s ballpoints that the world knows best. Yet, as so many pen makers now do, it also decided to enter the lucrative fountain pen ink market. Here…
Iroshizuku Ink Gets UV & pH Tested
No one should be surprised by the meteoric rise of Iroshizuku inks on the fountain pen scene. Japan’s finest ink makers have created dozens of colors and hues that offer vibrancy and shadowing while never clogging a vintage or modern fountain pen. We picked up 24 bottles of this amazing ink and have submitted them…
J. Herbin Ink Goes Under the Sun
French inks haven’t previously undergone our rigorous testing, and we were excited to give them a UV light-fast test and pH test. We purchased a small collection of a dozen different colors of J. Herbin. We started this test on March 7, 2021, by placing a sample of 13 inks in our sunniest window. We…
A Potpourri of Ink Tests
As we have been conducting our ink tests, we ran into a grouping of mostly orphaned bottles that wouldn’t make for a very big story individually. So we tested them together and got them all on one page. The ink proof sheet is on the left and the UV tested inks are on the right.…
Whoa! Montblanc Inks…Beware!
Happy New Year, everybody! Sorry for the long absence. December and early 2022 have been quite the rollercoaster. Happily, all is well now, and we hope to be back to rockin’ and rollin’ the ink-o-sphere. Wow! Three months in the sun fades the pigment right out of modern Montblanc inks. Mont Blanc ink burns worse…