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Miniature Calendar

Bleistift reader Tomasz Maped sent in another great find: Miniature Calendar. A web calendar with a miniature photo for every day. There is a big section on stationary-related photos.

You can find some nice examples below.

Copyright Tatsuya Tanaka
Copyright Tatsuya Tanaka
Copyright Tatsuya Tanaka

The images in this blog post has been taken from https://miniature-calendar.com/. I believe that the use of the screenshot shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

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Drying your plates with stationery

We have a new tea towel in use in our home. Not any tea towel …a stationery-themed one 8^)

In June 2019 I was lucky enough to have met the Pencil Talk Editor in person when he was in the UK and we had a nice stroll through the park. At the time he just visited the British Library’s Writing: Making Your Mark exhibition a few days earlier. Among other nice gifts he also brought me a tea towel from this exhibition. It’s really nice and felt too nice to use, so it was in storage for a while but we started using it now.

The tea towel from the Bristol Library’s exhibition

It looks great. I like that it doesn’t only feature pensbut all sorts of working tools.

It also does a good job at drying plates and cutlery 🙂

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Dead gel refills

If they have been left unused for a while it is not uncommon for gel pens / gel refills to stop working properly.

Unfortunately, this means that the more pens you have in your rotation / are using at the same time, the more likely you are not using them enough. That’s just what happened to me.

Top to bottom: Schneider Gelion (in a Caran d’Ache 849), Zebra JSB (in a Holbein x Rotring 600 3 in 1), Stabilo pointVisco

In the case of my Holbein x Rotring multipen the Zebra refill was only two years old. The blue refill is perfectly fine. Being blue meant it got used regularly, but the red refill didn’t get used quite as much, so stopped working. I have replaced it now with a red Lamy refill. The new red colour is grey-ish as is common for ballpoint refills, but it shouldn’t dry out as fast as the vibrant red Zebra JSB refill.

The Gelion refill was older. I actually made a video at the time that shows how to use this refill in a Cara d’Ache 849 …but as the refill was idle for too long it also stopped working.

The final gel-like pen that stopped working recently was Stabilo’s pointVisco. It did survive very long though: I think I got my first pointVisco in 2008, but as I had a set of mixed colours, some of them just weren’t used as much, so stopped working.

There are some common tricks to try to revive gel pens and refills, e.g. putting them in hot water. I tried these trick, but was unsuccessful and have decided to say goodbye to these two refills and the pen.

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