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I found a new hobby, last June, and it’s a surprisingly soothing, mesmerizing one. It’s calligraphy, with antique flexible-nib fountain pens.
My handwriting is scribble-scratch, and I got D’s and E’s for it in school. I eventually figured out it’s because my hand can’t keep up with my brain. But calligraphy is more like drawing. It makes me slow right down, and carefully form each letter. It’s mesmerizing, watching the tines of a flex-nib, flexing in and out, as thin & thick lines of colour flow from them. And I do mean COLOUR.
Bottled ink comes in every colour and shade you can imagine. Some inks contain glitter. Others are super-saturated with dyes that crystallize on the paper as they dry, producing a metallic sheen. Some inks have both. Depending on the combination of the pen, the ink, and the paper, you can get different results. It’s a combination of artwork, mindfulness, and science experiment!
And history, when you find a new antique pen to bring back to life. My youngest vintage pen is my dad’s Parker 61 capillary-filler, that he used to write his exams at Waterloo & U of T, in the late 50s-early 60s. My oldest is a solid-gold, hand-engraved Wahl from 1919. Imagine that! 99-year-old technology, that still works just as well as it did when it was new, and all it needed was a new rubber ink-sac!
And something else…
Now that I use my antique fountain pens (without flexing) for my everyday writing, it’s gotten a lot better.
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