Hey now, call it a mini, cos you know that you will… Other than a pen addict, I am a colour addict as well, and nothing can be more fulfilling than to receive a sponsorship from Stabilo in the form of COLOURFUL PENS. Hey now, look up! You wouldn’t want to miss this set of Stabilo point88 mini goodies! I’ve done a review of the Stabilo point88 before right here, so you already know my opinion on it way before this review. This “mini” version of the point 88 is pretty much similar to the “adult” (hehe) version of the same, but the awesomeness is now packed in a little sporty-looking plastic bottle. Note: you cannot put water (or ink, if you prefer) into the bottle and drink from the mouth at the top. Tried and tested, by yours truly. It just won’t work. Don’t try it at home (especially with ink). In it is a bundle of 18 differently coloured point88 minis. Just look at the wonderful colours available… If you observe the tag that comes along with the bottle, it actually shows all of the 18 colours in a nice sequence. So I arranged the pens in the same […]
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On December 31, 2012, I have done up a list of my top 10 pens of the year which you can read here. I will do a similar list for 2013, except that I did not manage to get it out in time to post it within 2013 itself, so it ended up being posted this year! The 2013 list will take a slightly different angle from the previous one. Pen acquisition has not been superfluous, which is good news for my bank account but bad news for my hobby! I will feature my top ten most used pens for the year. Running from left to right: Pilot Super Gel 0.5mm, Zig Brushables Brush Pen, Pilot Parallel Pen, Noodler’s Konrad Acrylic Forbidden City FP, Danitrio HD-3 Screen Temaki Flowers FP, Platinum Music Nib FP, vintage Nova Pen (Rose), Sailor Lecoule FP, vintage Waterman FP, and vintage Platinum PKA-500 Pocket Pen. Yes, I’ve included 2 non-fountain pens in the list, and a calligraphy (Pilot Parallel) pen, which some argue is not considered a fountain pen. Other than the non-fountain pens, I have arranged them in order of length, so that no pen bias occurs! It is also very difficult to […]
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One of my readers wrote to me to tell me about her Monteverde pens. Here’s what she said: I have been using fountain pens all my life. This year in May I received a Monteverde Prima for my birthday (brown swirl). Even though I normally like thinner pens this has an excellent ink flow and is fun to write with. When I went online to register it @ Monteverdepens.com – I saw that they had a clear barreled Monteverde Arista rollerball. Because you could purchase colored ink cartridges I decided to check that out. Wonderful! I also cut a small portion of cherry blossoms from a Hiroshige print from a small calendar and customized my pen by putting the print inside the clear barrel (my sister drew a black & white design for her pen). Fun! Well, Sando, thank you for writing in to share about your Monteverde pen! I’ve seen them around but haven’t gotten down to buying one yet (or request for samples). I should go take another look! Want your comments/reviews to be shared in a blog post? Write to me at write@onfountainpens.com! MaybellineI am the founder of this website. Chemist by day, slacker by night, fanatic […]
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Hey dear readers, I am back on track with blogging! Sorry I have been busy for the past few weeks (yes, in my “Hiatus” post I wrote “two weeks or so” but it ended up almost 1 month, oops!), but I would like to give a huge THANK YOU! to all my readers who have been constantly checking back on my blog. I seemed to have also gained a couple of new readers in the process. Hmm, maybe I should have more “hiatuses” like this! Kidding! I do miss blogging, though. The pen I will be writing about today is a nice grand pen. “Grand” here is used loosely, as in the overall feel and experience with the pen. Not imagining a diamond-studded Mont Blanc now, are you? The pen in question is much simpler-looking than that. Granted, it isn’t a fountain pen, but it is good enough to deserve some attention to it too. It is a… The pen is medium-big, black, rollerball, and silky-smooth. That’s probably the most apt sentence I can ever speak of about a pen. I bought this pen in a furniture shop in Singapore called King and King Wong, at the shopping mall […]
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Today’s review is a new look at an old pen. And it’s a pen that I am sure most of you have seen before: the Pilot V5 Hi-tecpoint! It is my typical school pen which I always used when I was still schooling. And by that I mean -ALWAYS-. I used this pen for taking down notes, writing on slips of paper to pass around behind the teacher’s back, draw on my friends’ arms for fun, doodling during boring lessons… Despite being such a frequently-used pen, I have never delved into the details about it. A quick search on Google brought me to Cult Pens, which gave a very short description about it. It was first launched in 1983 (wow, that is way before I even existed in this world!) and it is a needle-point rollerball. Cool, I didn’t know needle-pointed pens are rollerball pens. I always called them “ink pen”. Now I wonder why that term came out. Probably because before the use of rollerballs became popular, everyone in school used ballpoint pens. So when these needle points increased in popularity, everyone just grabbed one and probably called it the “ink pen” due to the smooth, consistent inky […]
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The review I am going to do today is of 3 types of pens from: This is my very first review of Stabilo products, so let’s rejoice! It means that I am scrutinizing more stationery brands for review on my blog, and I do hope that this would help you guys out there who are looking for an opinion on pens! Yesterday during lunch, I just decided to make a trip down to a shopping mall near my office to get some snacks for my snack cupboard (I believe everyone has one in the office. If you don’t have one, get one!). By some unknown magnetic force, I was drawn to the Popular Bookstore where there is of course a huge array of stationery. There were so many new pens, and so many familiar pens. Which pen should I buy? My decision was made when I had a sudden memory of my secondary school life, which was likely the Golden Age of my stationery explorations (bought a few new pens weekly). So I got some Pilots and Stabilos, which I will be reviewing today and in the next few days. The 3 Stabilos that I am reviewing today are […]
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Hello readers, I’m finally back after one week of absence from here. What have I been doing so far? Well, after my Vietnam trip that lasted from Tuesday to Friday last week, I had a bit of rest on Saturday, which unfortunately was morphed into a horror of a food poisoning on Sunday. Complete with diarrhoea, vomitting, and fever. I slept most of the Sunday away but I feel better today. Still having some cramps and diarrhoea, but I’ve seen a doctor and gotten some medication (was diagnosed with bacterial infection in the tract), and hopefully I’ll be perfectly fine in a couple of days. So what new acquisitions have I gotten lately? One nice “signature pen” which I will review another day, and two new kikki.k gel pens, which I will briefly share about today. The two pens are respectively named Rainbow Stitch and Bebis. Rainbow Stitch is probably thus named because of the squares of colour that make up a spectrum from one end of the pen to the other looking like a work of cross-stitching or embroidery. Although I would probably call this “Rainbow pixels instead”, to “keep up with technology”. Bebis is the Swedish word for […]
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The review today will be about the only two wooden pens that I currently own. One of them is a fountain pen of an unknown brand, and the other one is a ball point souvenir pen from Chamonix Mont Blanc (French Alps, not the German luxury brand), both of which my boyfriend has gifted me last year. As you can guess, both pens are very precious to me! I love how they look against the grass and under the sunlight. I guess being made of a natural material and aligned with the grassy theme of nature, they look even more gorgeous. Like how a puzzle fits into the correct space. And when aligned together like this, they look like another pen couple. If you’ve read my matchmaking post of my kikki.K pens you’ll be familiar with this concept. For those readers who have never seen such kinds of grass before, that’s because you are not from a tropical territory, or you have always lived in your home without ever coming out, or you just never looked. Here’s another wedding shot: Let me first talk about Mr. Unknown fountain pen. I had been very unwilling to ink it and write with […]
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Every new pen I buy seems to get better. This week sees the National Stationery Day in the U.K. (24 April, hey it’s today!), and oh how envious I am! I’m not from the U.K. so it is a pity that I can’t join in the fun! But I guess I can still do it my own way by having a new review, this time of two pens! If you’re reading this from the U.K. please show this day some support. Check out this website. This review is not going to be very in-depth, considering that I’m writing about TWO pens which were only recently acquired – four days ago. Why the hurry, you may ask? That’s because after getting these two pens, I was so impressed by them that I had to post about them already! Without having to be “accustomed” to them, I already knew they were the perfect ones for me. I’ve been searching around for a sleek-looking and well-behaved white fountain pen, and almost wanted to get the white Pilot Prera, but in the end this pen caught my attention and I just had to help myself. Now for the story of how I came […]
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For those of you who had gone through your adolescent years in Singapore, you are highly likely to have come across one of these markers before: Don’t they look lovely in the myriad of colours? I first started using these during my secondary school days (2001-2004) and they were incredibly popular in a convent school where the girls loved to decorate their notes, write postcards to each other, or simply using them for notation or highlighting purposes. The reason was because these pens are double-ended, which meant that I can use one end (0.5mm thickness) for normal writing, and the other end (1.2mm thickness) for colouring, marking, highlighting or decorating. The line thickness varies among pens, and also depends on the amount of usage you put on the pen. For the 0.5mm side, they are pretty consistent. However I observed that for pens that are more frequently used, if you have a heavy touch like me, the thickness of the 1.2mm side tends to increase over time, less for some pens and more for others. Looking at the sample writing, you can probably guess which ones are my favourites that have been used more frequently, judging from the […]
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