To read an excerpt from the book, please click on the following link:

ashaveilbook.blogspot.com

An excerpt from The Pleasure Palace, my romantic comedy, can be found here:



Thursday, March 27, 2014

More Ink

  • Note:  I get seriously bored when sick, kind of like a hamster treading its wheel. I decided to post some pictures of the ink samples I will be getting.  These will probably last quite some time, even though the ink samples are small.  Noodlers comes in really big bottles, so I feel I can only get a few full sized ones at a time. I love their ink names; sometimes I buy them because the name has charmed me too much to resist:.  All images are from Goulet's Pens:


This one is called "Black Swan in Australian Roses" (I don't think there's a poet on earth who can resist this name):


Interestingly, the owner of Noodler's Ink demonstrates the inks using the tip of a sharp knife, which he then wipes bladewise , quite evenly, onto the paper, like spreading jam.  This tends to show qualities of the inks that I normally do not think about, such as shading (you can see that here).

The "sister" ink to this is "Black Swan in English Roses":





This reminds me a bit of melted milk chocolate, and I am not sure where the English roses fit in...perhaps it is a deeply shaded pink, more like melted Neapolitan ice cream than milk chocolate. Still, I like the name and am seriously considering this in my full-bottle purchase.

Next is one whose name actually bothered me, but the color also intrigued me, as well as the story behind it:  the ink's creators (what do you call someone who blends ink colors, I wonder?) wanted a color to mimic mercurochrome. This is something most people in my generation remember: a clear orange antiseptic that stained skin a bright sunset pink.  I had no idea mercurochrome has been outlawed in the US, because it contains mercury.

The name of this color is Dragon's Napalm (I remember the Vietnam War very well and have students and friends whose families suffered unimaginably in the war, so that is why the name bothered me.  I do wish they would change it):




One review said that this ink was really nice, but writing in it was like yelling!  Another person said that she used it to grade papers: I could see doing that, because I am trying to move more and more away from disposable pens.

For obvious reasons, I could NOT resist "Zhivago" (my mother loved the movie and it is one of my good memories, going to the theatre to see it...I have not yet read the book but it is on my to-do list):


I can imagine myself in a dacha covered all in white with ice, with my one warm chamber at the heart of it , and me writing poems by hand with this ink (if you don't know about the ice-covered dacha, you have to see Dr. Zhivago-it is far too stunning of an image to describe here).

Last one for tonight is another chosen by name, and also by color.  It is called "Mata Hari's Cordial":




This is a rather mysterious color, neither mauve nor purple.  It is sort of a purple-orchid color.

That's it for the night; thank you for stopping by my little corner of the world.



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