Ink Review and Giveaway: J. Herbin Lie de Thé

Lily at Jet Pens was kind enough to send me a bottle of J. Herbin Lie de Thé to review here. As in my review of the Noodler's Navy she sent me, I'm sharing the freebie by making a giveaway part of the review.

The Review

This almost became the Internet's first ink review without any representation of the ink. No matter what I do, I can't seem to adjust my scanner to scan with results even approaching what my inks actually look like on the page, and it's very difficult to capture with photography, too. This color proved particularly difficult.

The net result is that even with these lame pictures I am including, you're going to have to depend mostly on my description to get an idea of the color. There is, however, one way for you to know exactly what this tea looks like: enter and win the giveaway! (Instructions to enter at the end of the post.)

The skipping with the italic nibs is not the fault of the ink.
I am still having trouble holding italic nibs to the paper correctly.

So, let's start with my opinion that this may be the world's most appropriately named ink. According to Google Translate, "lie de thé" translates to English as "dregs of tea." Since "dregs" means "the remnants of a liquid left in a container, together with any sediment or grounds" (according to Google Dictionary), I'd say J. Herbin really nailed it with this name: if you imagine what you'd end up with by dipping your pen into the liquid that leaks out of a teabag after you remove it from your tea and lay it on a saucer, then you have a pretty good idea of the color of this ink.

The ink shades quite heavily (yet another characteristic I have not managed to convey in the pictures). So heavily, in fact, that to me, the shading is not interesting, but distracting, as if someone watered down an ink that was supposed to be richer in color.

I'll leave it at that, my subjective opinion of the color, rather than get into things like lubrication, etc., because (1) I'm still learning my way around inks, and (2) since I tested this on a Rhodia Dot Pad, it seems pointless to comment on the lack of feathering or bleedthrough, because almost nothing I've tried so far  feathers or bleeds on Clairefontaine/Rhodia paper. (I'll tell you about the exceptions in future posts.)

The giveaway

Now, if you got the idea that I don't really care for this color, you're right. It's not my  . . . don't say it, Booker . . . not my . . . Booker, fight it! . . . not my . . . Oh, Booker, I can't believe you're going to say it! . . . not my cup of tea. (Ouch!) So, instead of giving away just samples, like I did with the Noodler's Navy, I'm giving away the remainder of the bottle to the giveaway winner, and a runner-up will receive a 2ml sample. I've used this ink rather sparingly, so I'm guessing the winner, after the sample for the runner-up, should still end up with more than half a bottle.

The usual giveaway sign-up procedures apply:

1. Leave a comment.

2. Send me an email at notebookeresqATgmail.com. The body of the email must include the name you used to comment and the subject line of the email must read exactly:

DREGS

I need the email so I can be sure I can contact the winners. If you leave a comment without sending a proper email or email me without leaving a comment, you will not be entered.

I'm not setting a deadline. How long I let the entry period run depends on the number of entries, traffic, and whether this giveway makes it into this Saturday's "Ink Links" at The Pen Addict. I'll pick a winner and runner up when I'm ready.  Good luck!

If you're unlucky in the giveaway but still want this ink, J. Herbin Lie de Thé is available in a 30ml bottle for $9.00 from Jet Pens. While you're there, load up your cart with a few more goodies — orders over $25 ship free. That's the lowest free shipping threshold I've seen.

UPDATE (2/9/11): The giveaway is closed, and the winners are announced here.

Ink Review and Giveaway: J. Herbin Lie de Thé

Review: Diamine Maroon Ink

Just a few strokes into writing with this ink, I was already thinking, Maroon? Really? This just isn't what I think of as maroon, but maybe I don't have a good understanding of what maroon is. I expected it to be more of a burgundy color, but to my eye, this ink is more of a grayish-red. The color was somewhat unexpected.

If i was you, I'd trust that verbal description of the ink more than I'd trust my pictures. I did my best to adjust these scans so the color matched what I see on the paper, but I just cannot seem to get the hang of photographing or scanning ink colors correctly.

At work, I would probably use this ink only for editing. It's a little too red for me to favor for correspondence or notes, and I wouldn't sign anything with it. That's just me.

Otherwise, writing with this ink was pleasant. It seemed well-lubricated, neither particularly wet nor particularly dry. Flow seemed fine but, like several inks I've tried, it skipped severely with italic nibs on Rhodia paper.

On fountain-pen friendly paper like the Rhodia pad, the shading is significant in all nib sizes.

Diamine Maroon on Rhodia paper

On the Levenger wire-bound notebook paper, which is a little more absorbent, there was still a good deal of shading.

Diamine Maroon on Levenger wire-bound notebook paper

On the Tops Docket Gold yellow pad, the most absorbent of the three, the shading was far less. Then again, that's not really something I worry about when taking notes.

Diamine Maroon on Tops Docket Gold legal pad

One feature of the ink that is undeniably cool (and I can capture in a scan regardless of whether I get the color right -- yay!) is that it tends to outline the strokes. Look at that close-up, and you'll see what I mean. It's like someone took an ultra-fine tip and a darker ink and outlined the writing. If I can find this quality in a color I like more, I will have found a winner!

Outlining of Diamine Maroon ink on Rhodia paper

Having tried this ink on three papers, I think I can see it does not bleed or feather much. Like most inks I've tried, it did not bleed or feather on the Rhodia pad at all (on which almost nothing does, which is why I tried more papers), but even on the more absorbent Levenger paper, through which some inks do bleed, there was no bleeding or feathering at all. I was writing some notes for court the other day and got halfway down the backside of a sheet before I realized I even was writing on the back side. What a pleasant experience, given the bleeding Levenger papers I have tried before (circa and a grid pad)!  Even the show-through was very, very light (photo). Only on the Tops Docket Gold legal pad did the ink bleed significantly (photo), but it didn't feather even there.

An overall nice ink with a shade that isn't quite my cup of tea.  If I could get used to the color, though, I'd love to use this for correspondence because of the outlining behavior.

Flickr photo set here.

Review: Diamine Maroon Ink

My struggle with Circa, part 2: What's up with this paper?

If you've been reading my blog a while, then you may remember that I posted a very short version of my frustrations with Levenger's Circa notebooks. That post triggered some comments from those who love their Circa, and from others who likewise found them frustrating. I promised to keep trying it out. I am discovering some good, some bad along the way.

In any event, I thought those of you that commented might be curious to see how the experiment is going.

As the title gives away, this post is about the Levenger pre-punched Circa paper. Now, I don't see any explicit claims on the Levenger website that the Circa paper is fountain-pen friendly, but: (1) I have seen reviewers make that claim; (2) Levenger has at least one picture of a fountain pen on a Circa product page; and (3) the pre-punched Circa paper is insanely expensive. With all that, you'd expect it to take fountain open ink well, but I'm here to tell you: if you want to use a fountain pen regularly in a Circa notebook, you should count on buying a Circa punch so you can buy some decent paper for doing so, because the Circa paper I checked out stinks.

I started with a letter-size and junior size Circa starter kits. The paper felt nice and smooth, and its darned heavy (60 lb.) paper. But after trying a variety of pens on it, I was asking myself how they managed to engineer such a thick, smooth piece of paper into a bloody mess. That ink has to travel a long way to bleed through, but this paper apparently makes the trip easy. I tried Rolla brand paper from Staples, too, and it was just as bad.

Levenger Circa paper bleed-through

Rolla brand paper bleed-through

 Curiously (or maybe not so curiously?), the colored Circa papers — grey, yellow and blue — performed much better:

Colored papers did better; Rolla brand paper at top right

Honestly, my office's everyday copy paper performs better.

So there I was, about to write off Circa forever just because the Circa paper did not take fountain pen ink well. The I started reading around Fountain Pen Network and DIY Planner and saw that lots of people are in search of better paper and plenty of people are willing to offer their advice.

Then I realized: I'm not going to be writing with fountain pens in any event. I mean, I love fountain pens, but for my everyday work notebook, keeping track of projects and my calendar, a nice gel pen is fine. But I did not like the layout of the CIrca paper, either. So I settled on some 32 lb Wausau paper, very slick to the touch. My Zebra Sarasa Clip gel pens slide across it like skates on ice. (It doesn't take fountain pen ink all that much better than the Circa paper, but at least I can print my own layouts on it.) So, I''ve kept going with Circa, and will post more about my ups and downs as I go.

And wouldn't you know, just as I get around to bitching about the Circa paper, Biffybeans announces at FPN that Levenger will be carrying Rhodia 90 gsm paper for their letter-sized Circa notebooks. Genuine letter-sized rather than A4? That would be great, except I use a junior size Circa (5.5 in x 8.5 in). But let's give it time and see what develops. (UPDATE: And here it is. But is 90 gsm heavy enough to stand up to repeated page turning and extraction/insertion?)

My struggle with Circa, part 2: What's up with this paper?

Noodler's Navy ink review, ink sample giveaway . . . and disclosure of a deep, dark secret (updated with winners)

Nothing particularly "Navy" about that catfish!

I've been sitting on two bottles of ink Jet Pens generously provided me for free for reviews. Here's the first one: Noodler's Navy.

Odd they decided not to call it Navy Blue, but I guess the "blue" is obvious. Nobody's going to think it's Navy orange. Which could explain why they went with a catfish on the label instead of something navy-related. I'll have more to say about "navy blue" when I reveal the secret near the end of this post, and instructions for entering the ink sample giveaway are at the very end of this post.


So, you all know that I'm still earning my ink review chops, but I have a couple of very general observations to make here.


The Review


I did not like this color at all the first time I tried it. It seemed boring, especially compared to my then-favorite blue, Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo. But this ink has really been growing on me. The shading is attractive, and the blue is such a deep midnight color.



You'll see some skipping toward the end of that line written with the 1.5 mm italic nib, but I'm pretty sure that was the fault of the nib, which needed a good soak. This ink has flowed exceptionally well in all three pens I've tried, and it seems well-lubricated. It even made my dry-writing Pilot Knights feel comfortable to write with. It's a wet-writing ink that also tended to make my pens write a little broader than they do with other inks. But the comfort made it worth it, and you just have to remember that characteristic when you ink up.

I must say that I think Noodler's Navy stacks up well against other deep blues in appearance. The deep, deep midnight color is quite attractive.



I really don't think I've done this ink justice with these photos. Hopefully I'll have a working scanner again by the time I write my next ink review.

The Secret

Now, to make up for these cruddy pictures, it's time for me to let you in on that secret. While this color does indeed resemble what most people think of as "navy blue," there is no "navy blue" in the Navy. I spent four years at the Naval Academy and another five years in the Marine Corps, where I spent plenty of time around squids sailors, and I can tell you on good authority that every Navy uniform you think is blue is . . . black. Not dark, dark, dark, dark blue. Black. Noodler's Heart of Darkness black. Peacoats (which we called "reefers") and overcoats: black. Ties: black. That dark band around the white caps ("covers") and shoulder boards: black. Those double-breasted suit-looking uniforms ("service dress blue"): black, black black.

The dungarees, of course, are blue, as are the ball caps worn with them. And the stripe around the edge of a plebe cover at the Naval Academy ("dixie cup" -- I've still got mine around here, somewhere!) is also blue  . . . but that's about it.

Somewhere in naval history, there must have been more blue. Or maybe the color is named from someone else's navy. Whatever the case, Noodler's Navy is a pleasing deep midnight blue. At least, that's what I call it.

The Giveaway

Jet Pens sent me this bottle of ink for free, and I'm going to share the good fortune by giving away five -- count 'em, five -- ink samples of 2-4 ml each. To enter yourself in the giveaway, all you've got to do is leave a comment on this post before midnight Sunday night, October 3. The time stamp on the comment will determine the timing of your entry. I'll select five comments at random and post the winners here and in a new post on Monday, October 4. Winners will have one week to email me their mailing address.


It helps if you use a distinctive name or leave some unique comment. If three guys named Dan leave a comment, that makes it easier to distinguish the Dan that is the winner.


Update: The Winners!


Winners were picked using Random.org's random number generator. Congratulations to the following, each of whom has until midnight on Monday, October 11 to claim his or her ink simple by emailing me his or her mailing address:


Julie (Okami)
Joyce
Christina
Erin C.
Alex

Use the the Gmail badge in the sidebar to email me. I may not be able to mail the samples until this weekend, so please be patient.

Noodler's Navy ink review, ink sample giveaway . . . and disclosure of a deep, dark secret (updated with winners)

How I screwed up my first ink review — oh yeah, with a review of Private Reserve's "Burgundy Mist" ink thrown in!

This is my first ink review, so you'll have to cut me some slack. Perhaps you'll be more inclined to do so if you understand that tortured journey that brought me to this first review. If you don't care to read this part, skip to the heading "The Review" below.

The Struggle

About four months ago, I bemoaned the unhelpfulness of many ink reviews, due not to the inadequacies of the reviewers, but because of all the variables involved in performance. Really, all a review can do it tell you how the ink wrote in the particular pen(s), on the particular paper(s), with the particular nib(s) used in the review. On top of that, everything from writing pressure to humidity will cause variations even with a particular pen/paper/nib combination, and then you've got to wonder how closely the depiction on your monitor resembles the color of the ink when its right in front of you.

So, I set out to write the world's best ink review, even though I only started using fountain pens consistently last February. Such is my hubris, I suppose. I had grand plans of comparing entire color families in a single review, with the objective of helping readers choose the perfect gray, or perfect red, or perfect what not for their tastes.

I failed utterly.

Through the convenience of ink samples available through Pear Tree Pens and Goulet Pen Co., I started by comparing 6 different grays before settling on and purchasing a full bottle of my favorite. But I never got around to writing the review because all the sheets of writing I had in front of me at that time made the project too daunting.

So humbled, I set about trying to review one ink at a time, figuring I could at least design the perfect review format, with a consistent form that would provide readers with everything they needed to know about the ink. (There's that hubris again.) I'm sure there must be a name in the psychological literature for the symptoms I displayed in that difficult quest — but I believe the layman's term is that I "couldn't see the forest for the trees." I got so bogged down in minutiae (it is an exaggeration, but not a great one, to say that I was considering buying an anemometer, barometer and hygrometer so I could take wind speed, air pressure, and humidity into account) that I finally gave up.

Humbled yet again, I've decided to wing it with one or two good ideas that survive from my experience, and to refine my technique as I go. Why deprive my readers of my unenlightened ink commentary?  I mean, they come here for my unenlightened commentary on everything else, so why should inks be excluded?
  
As a result of all that, Private Reserve Burgundy Mist became the subject of my first review merely because I got tired of trying to do it right with some other colors, got fed up, and posted this out of exasperation.

But enough about my personal problems. On with the show!

The Review

I like this ink. A lot.

I should write a little more.

Like I said, I came up with at least one ink review idea that I think is pretty good. That is to show how
the ink looks from different nibs. So, I went online and ordered extra nibs for my Lamy Safari and Al-Star. Then I thought I'd also feature the ink in a "guest pen," i.e., something other than the Safari or AL-Star.

In the photo below, you can see the same line of text written in progressively broader nibs on the Safari, starting with XF on the top, on Rhodia Dot Pad paper:

Top to bottom: Lamy Safari with XF, F, M, B, 1.1 mm italic, 1.5 mm italic, and 1.9mm italic nibs; Cross Apogee F nib at bottom

 Here's a close-up to try to give you a better idea of the shading and color differences:

Shading is most visible in the italic nibs

Not much more help, is it?

I tried photographing the writing samples in flat outdoor light (both in and out of the shade on a cloudy day), next to a brightly lit window, even under a few different types of artificial light. None of the photos satisfactorily shows the differences in color and shading among the different nibs, but I ultimately used the photos taken next to a sunny window and applied the "enhance" function in iPhoto, which took me closest to the actual color of the ink. The best depiction of the shading is probably the enlargement at the beginning of this post.

Here, I've written next to some Burgundy Mist test squiggles in Visconti Burgundy with a Lamy Safari medium nib, and you can see that Private Reserve and Visconti have very different ideas of what "burgundy" is:

Visconti Burgundy looks red compared to PR Burgundy Mist

I wonder if they would see eye-to-eye on burgundy wines.

I didn't do extensive testing on flow, feathering, bleeding, etc. For one thing, these samples were written on a Rhodia Dot Pad, an insanely fountain pen-friendly medium, on which I don't expect any ink to bleed or feather. However, on less friendly papers the bleeding and feathering seemed modest, considering that my squared Moleskine bleeds inks so badly that I half expect it to cause a graphite pencil line to bleed through the paper.

I don't blame this skipping on the ink

Oddly, I did note that I got a lot of skipping on downstrokes when I did my handwriting drill with this ink in a Clairefontaine notebook.
That, too, is a canvas especially friendly to fountain pens, but this is not the first ink I've had skip a lot in it. That, combined with the fact that the nib seemed a little loose, makes me think that the ink is not to blame here.
So, there you have it. These photo enlargements don't look too good. I'm going to see if I can get better resolution photos up, so if you liked the review but didn't like the photos, try checking back in a week or so.

How I screwed up my first ink review — oh yeah, with a review of Private Reserve's "Burgundy Mist" ink thrown in!

J. Herbin Orange Indien and the conservative lawyer

I've read so many reviews of J. Herbin's Orange Indien ink in the last few months that I figured I might as well order a sample of it while I was ordering a bunch of other samples from Goulet Pens, even though I didn't otherwise have an interest in an orange ink. I just had to see what all the fuss was about.

Having tried it out, all I can say is: this is going to take some getting used to.

Let me explain why orange ink is a tough sell for me. First, I'm not about to use it in the office. Too flashy. Second, I'm not even likely to use it in correspondence. So, what's left?

Art. And believe me, I am no artist.

Which probably explains why I was less than overwhelmed by this ink. At first, anyway.

The most surprising thing about it is that it initially struck me as a dry-writing ink, unlike every other J. Herbin I've tried. It actually rendered by Lamy AL-Star extra fine nib scratchy on a Rhodia dot pad. Even in my wettest writer, the Pelikan P55 Future, the line was not what I'd call very wet.

The color didn't do anything for me, either. Like I said, I have no interest in an orange ink. I was, however, hoping at least to be wowed by the color. But even evaluated in the abstract rather than for utility, the color was a disappointment.

The lighting in this photo really doesn't give you a very good idea of the shading.

But the second day, the ink flowed more readily. The line laid down was wetter, the color much richer. Maybe some water had been in the feeds when I inked the pens the day before. Whatever the reasons, the richer color on the second day really looked quite nice.

So, I won't rule this out for correspondence, after all. But it's still not likely to get much use around the office, except perhaps for marking up drafts.

I'll do full review some time in the future. If you're reading this, you've probably already read at least one review of Orange Indien, but in case you haven't, here are some you can check out:

Rhodia Drive
Office Supply Geek
Rants of the Archer
Passion du Jour
Seize the Dave (one of the best blog names evah)

J. Herbin Orange Indien and the conservative lawyer