Life Noble Note – Review

Besides loving good pens, I also love good paper. Pens and paper are complementary to each other, and no matter how good a pen you have, it is of no use if you can’t find some decent paper to write on with it.

Note: pens not included in the sponsorship!

This notebook I’m about to review has got to be one of the best notebooks out there so far, that isn’t Rhodia or Clairefontaine… let’s have a look at the Life Noble Note Book (and watch out for the giveaway below):

The Life Noble Note is a vintage-looking, softcover notebook. I was sponsored by Fook Hing Trading Co. for this review and giveaway, but don’t worry, I’ll be giving my honest personal opinion of the notebook as always! Let’s have a better look at my Life Noble Note without the mess of pens:

I’m not sure if I should call this red or orange, and I’m not good with colour names even though I love them. A quick search on Google told me that a close match should be “vermilion”. Okay, got it.

My bright and cheery vermilion Life Noble Note Book is A5-sized, has 100 sheets of smooth cream paper with very faint gridlines, and looks like some of the good old notebooks that I used when I was a kid. While my childhood was not so far away, I describe this notebook “vintage” because of the floral border pattern, thick serifed font, and the brand “Life” in shiny gold foil. Don’t you think it looks vintage-y too?

The notebook is made in Japan and is as simple as can be. While there are some words at the back in Japanese that look like the description and care instructions (don’t take my word for it, I don’t understand Japanese but I am interpreting this from whatever Chinese characters I found there), there is hardly any marketing seen on this notebook at all. In fact, if I see this notebook on the shelves in a stationery store, I may not even think of picking it up, so it looks so simple! I’m glad that it has been brought to my attention!

This Life Noble Note Book lies flat when opened up, and of course I can’t resist testing my pens on the very smooth cream paper immediately:

It’s pretty self explanatory if you can view the pictures, but in case something went wrong, I’ll just let you know what I did on the paper.

Pens used (with links to my reviews of them, in case you are interested):

• Stabilo point 88 mini
• Stabilo Pen 68
• Stabilo point Visco
• Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pen (M nib)
• Pilot Kakuno fountain pen (F nib)
• Pilot Custom 742 (SFM nib)
• Pilot Parallel 1.5mm nib
• Pilot Parallel 2.4mm nib
• Lamy Joy AL Calligraphy pen 1.2mm nib
• Platinum music nib
• ZIG Scroll & Brush pen

In summary:

There was very little showthrough of the inks and almost no bleedthrough on the back side of the page! OK, there is 1 exception which was with the very wet Pilot Parallel 2.4mm pen. The ink flow is generous, so I tested the integrity of the paper by passing the nib over the same spot 1, 2, 3, and 4 times. That lays down many layers of ink, and I would be surprised if the paper was still able to withstand the bombardment of such quantities. I mean, just look at how inky the Pilot Parallel is:

Of course it’s not cool for lefties as it takes a longer time to dry, and I have already smudged my writing sample soon after writing on the page. But looking at the result above, the bleedthrough only comes after 3 passes of the nib, and it took 4 passes to blot through to the next page. One has got to be insane to have a tendency to overwrite the same stroke this many times with a Pilot Parallel!

I wasn’t sure what creative urges came over me suddenly, so I decided to do a little bit of art on this first page together with my writing samples. What I did was simply to outline and roughly fill areas on the paper with my Stabilo mini pens, then use a wet paintbrush to run over the colours to make the smudged-fill effect. The tree trunk was brushed over using a diluted form of Noodler’s #41 brown ink.

Even with the water, brushing, and multiple passes of the Stabilos on the paper, there is hardly any bleedthrough, and minimal showthrough. The crumpling is due to the water that I inflicted upon the paper…

Are you all set for the giveaway now? Have I whetted your appetite enough to make you want one of these wonderful quality paper?

Up for grabs are 3 Life Noble Note Books: the vermilion, blue, and brown variants. They are all A5 sized and the differences between them lie in the inner pages – the vermilion has the grids, the light blue has lines, and the brown contains blank sheets. Use them for drawing, numbering, calculating, note-taking, journaling… anything! Have I mentioned how much I like that the lines are soft enough to tell you there are there, but don’t interfere too much with your reading and writing?

Brown – blank; Vermilion – grid; Blue – lined

To enter, it’s not difficult. Just do one or more of the following and you get the respective number of chances to win! Note that you have to strictly use the Rafflecopter widget or your entry will not be counted! This giveaway is open till November 22 and anyone with a mailing address can enter! 🙂

If you’re skipping the giveaway and would like to get the Life Noble Note Book on your own, there are a variety of places you can get it from:

• Fook Hing Trading Co.
• Tokyu Hands Singapore
• Notemaker AU
• JetPens
• Amazon US
• Amazon CA

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Maybelline

I am the founder of this website.
Chemist by day, slacker by night, fanatic of stationery all the time.
I write with my left hand, but can also do the same with my right hand – it just won’t look very pretty.

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