Inky Wednesday: Wearingeul and Birmingham Pen Company

A short while ago I picked up some ink – one incidental from Wearingeul, others a shared bundle from Birmingham Pen Company. I picked up the Traveler's Company 20th Anniversary card-sized notebook from Vanness and added Wearingeul's The Sorrows of Young Werther to my order, since it has been on my wishlist for a while. As for the ink bundle from Birmingham Pen Company, it contained Saltmarsh, Water Bear, and Mountain Thistle, but I already had a 50mL bottle of Saltmarsh. Luckily someone else just wanted Saltmarsh, so we worked out a deal. (P.S. Saltmarsh is a great, weird gray-brown/brown-gray that I recommend people pick up, if you're fans of weird colors)

Wearingeul

I'd heard that The Sorrows of Young Werther had similarities to Sailor Shikiori Yuki-Usagi, which is one of my favorites, so I was curious about it. In reality it's pretty different, both in the swatch and in the writing, but I love it for its own interesting multishading.

In the swatch you can really see the yellow-green chromoshading against the blue-gray base, but in reality, writing looks like a warm gray, compared to the cooler Sailor Yuki-Usagi. I like the combination of the yellow-green with the blue-gray, so I don't mind. You'll definitely need to put it in a wetter pen to see any of the multishading, but if you like a nice gray on the warmer side, even in a finer or drier nib, you'll get that.

Birmingham Pen Company

Water Bear and Mountain Thistle are both strange when they first hit the page. Water Bear looks like a very dirty, swampy dark green while wet, and Mountain Thistle looks like a darker blue when wet. Since BPC had an error batch of one of their inks a while back that was green instead of the grayish-blue it was supposed to be, I worried that somehow my bottle of Water Bear had the same problem, but no, given time to try, it becomes a medium, warm brown with a hint of red. Mountain Thistle dries down to a lovely dusky lilac.

I currently have The Sorrows of Young Werther and Water Bear in my pens with architect nibs, my go-tos for being able to see ink characteristics while still being able to write small (and the reason I choose ink before pen a lot of the time, which I'll write more about later).

I really like them, even though they both have since gotten darker due to some evaporation in the pen. I haven't placed Mountain Thistle yet, but I will be cleaning out a bunch of my currently inked pens now that it's the beginning of another month and a lot of them have either been written dry or have dried out due to lack of use (😅), so it'll be used soon. Ideally I would refill my Pilot Custom 74 in Lavender Fog with it, but we'll see.

Although one of these current inks is a brown, I'm surprised to see that for once in a long time, browns aren't dominating my batch of currently inked pens. Actually, this time, grays have taken the lion's share of pens. I'll if it's still the case after some pen cleaning, but I would like to write about the gray inks I've been enjoying recently. Keep an eye out for that.