Welcome to Issue#31.

As summer gives way to the monsoon where I live, we have a lot of excitement over new inks, a new pen and the upcoming Pelikan Hubs.

The past few days have been quite inky - and the inkspoon has hardly had any rest! In our last fountain pen meet, we were discussing the Lamy Dark Lilac 2024, and one of the ideas that we bandied about was that watering it down might actually help bring out the Lilac colour that was being overpowered by the sheen.

As a proof of concept, I watered down some Lamy Dark Lilac 2024 - by a lot. It wrote a light lilac, and the swatch was rather interesting.

Now it’s only a matter of figuring out how much to water it and be able to get a Dark Lilac with a bit of sheen. Hopefully I will get to it before something else grabs my attention!

A few new inks I got, as well as an old favourite got swatched, thanks to the inkspoon’s ease of use.

Krishna Chennai is one of my favourite inks. The colour is a very complex one, and reminds me of the silk sarees woven in Kanchipuram. I find it very calming and pleasant, and have swatched it a bunch of times!

Krishna Sufi is an ink I have been eyeing for a while, and finally acquired a few days ago, along with my first Krishna pen (more on that below). It is right in my current favourite palette of teal and allied colours, and is a very well-behaved ink.

According to the Kuretake website, the "MEIJINOIRO" series is a beautiful selection of colored inks which were inspired by popular colors from the Meiji era of Japan (1868 to 1912). In the late Meiji era, new colors were born with the creation of chemical dyes. "Shimbashi" is the name of a place found in Tokyo. The bright, bluish-green color was popular among "Geisha" in Shimbashi as it was fashionable and trendy.

Maruzen is a famous Japanese stationery store whose shop-exclusive Athena inks are made by Sailor. I find Marine Blue to be a good representation of the dark and mysterious ocean depths that could very well be hiding a kaiju or two.

Hazard Green is one of the ten Mafia series inks from Krishna Inks. It is a rich dark green whose only hazard is of you becoming obsessed with it! A low-maintenance ink, this is very easy to wash out of your pen if you are changing ink colours.

Krishna Pens are made by Dr Sreekumar, a Palakkad-based pen maker who also make Krishna inks, many of which you have seen in swatches on the Fountain Pen Weekly. We have also had him on the Fountain Pen Weekly, talking about his entry into the world of fountain pen making.

I have been wanting to get a Krishna Pen for myself for quite a while now, but these are not in regular production, and the ones that come for sale are snapped up quickly. This is changing recently as Dr Sreekumar has set up a WhatsApp groups for those who want to buy the pens, and he makes sure everyone gets to buy at least one pen. He has also set up a production process that will soon hopefully have enough pens that it can be had for open sale or with a very small waiting period.

The pen I got recently - my first Krishna Pen - is the Zuki Roma with a Krishna nib with an iQR grind. The model is Zuki - a big pen pen, 149 mm capped and 134 mm uncapped, with a barrel girth of 13.9 mm and cap girth of 15.5 mm at their broadest. The section girth is 10.9 mm flaring to 11.5 mm.

The finish is Roma - a rough matte lacquer finish on an ebonite base. The texture is warm to the touch and very pleasant to hold. The lacquer has been developed by Dr Sreekumar after a lot of trials and tests, and it makes the pen more robust. It certainly feels robust, though I’m not about to test it!

The cap comes off in a hair under two turns, and has a broad clip reminiscent of the clips of old Kim pens. This clip is more modern-looking and minimalist, and is sturdy and functional.

The section is comfortable for long writing sessions. I grip in the narrower part, slightly above the flare towards the nib.

The nib is a #6-sized Krishna nib, decorated with a stamped peacock feather on it. It is marked with the words Sree (in Devanagari script) and Krishna India (in English script). The nib has a special iQR grind done by Dr Sreekumar. This is an oval-shaped grind that provides a smooth writing surface for a wide variety of writing angles.

Overall it’s a nice package - looks good, feels even better to hold and write with, and the smooth writing of the nib in a bunch of positions makes it really good for everyday use. It fills from a standard international cartridge or a converter.

I haven’t been able to stop smiling whenever I have been using this pen - it’s been that good! I have been using it for work, for making random notes, for handwriting practice and for journalling. Different things have combined in this pen to make it my current favourite - the size and hand-feel, the comfortable section, the smooth and forgiving nib. It was certainly worth the wait!

This is the last week to sign up to this year’s Pelikan Hub - if you have not, definitely do so right away.

My hometown, Coimbatore, is on the Pelikan Hubs map for the very first time. I had contacted some fountain pen enthusiasts there and told them about it and it seems to have worked. I am stoked to see Pelikan Hubs in new cities this year!

Share your take on fountain pens and related things in one (or more!) of our upcoming issues.

Any and all content you share will belong to you and will be credited to your name (or a pen name of your choice) and linked to any of your online profiles. Ideal content would be a write-up between 200 and 400 words with 1 to 5 images.

Here are a few things that can go in the Fountain Pen Weekly:

• Pen / ink / paper ownership experience

• Favorites in FP, ink, paper etc.

• Your social handles with your FP content - Insta, FB, Twitter, Reddit

• Any FP-related content you want to call out - articles, podcasts, videos.

If you have any other ideas as well, do share, and I will be happy to think about it.

That’s all from me this week.

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