Rhymes with spoons

April 2013 Glossybox.

From left to right, I got:

• Tigi Glow Blush
• Honest Organic Lip Balm (Orange Vanilla)
• Alterna Haircare Bamboo Style Boho Waves Tousled Textured Mist
• Wash With Joe Coffeemint Invigorating Body Wash
• Bvlgari Eau Parumée au thé Blanc Tea Bag for Bath
• Le Métier de Beauté Replenishing Daily Solution
• Certificate for $75 toward a jar of the Le Métier

The blush is more of a shimmery bronzer and is almost clay-colored on my very pale skin, but I’ll take it for summer. The lip balm tastes nice and isn’t waxy but smooth, and I’m very intrigued by a bath teabag. 

Azalea Festival.

I won an Exaclair giveaway over at the Quo Vadis blog! Here’s what I got:

A Bloc Rhodia pad, No. 11. It’s about 3”x4” and has 80g grid paper inside. Also I got to try some J. Herbin cartridges in Vert Pre. It’s a nice spring green with some yellow tones and it shades well, but definitely needs to be in a wider nib. It gets hard to read in a finer line. :) Vert Pre has more color variation than Iroshizuku’s Chiku-rin. The lighting in the last photo doesn’t do it justice. 

Sunny Huang from ExaClair was nice enough to send me some new G. Lalo stationery to review!

At top is a tablet of Vergé de France A5 tablet paper in a soft pink. The outside cover has sort of a holograph effect—when you tilt it in the light, it turns bluish-purple. G. Lalo paper is known for the horizontal lines that go across the page; these are the byproduct of the manufacturing technique used in creating “laid paper” like this. You can feel the texture under your nib as you write, which is why everyone always recommends writing with a medium to broad pen. If you use something thin, it’s liable to skip or become squiggly or blocky because of the lines. I think the pink looks great with J. Herbin Larmes de Cassis ink.

Below that is a correspondence card, which is a thick single card with no folds. There’s little space to write on, so it’s kind of a luxury given how expensive stamps are now. G. Lalo cards are heavier than Crane & Co., I’m noticing—these feel close in weight to scrapbooking cardstock. They do absorb the ink and create a slightly thicker line than you might expect from your pen. These have a paper airplane and heart motif embossed at the top, which I love, because I’m going through a letterpress phase right now and am amazed at some of the designs that are out there. The ink matches the aqua envelope, but it looks metallic to me, almost like it’s foiled. You can also see the toothiness of the paper where I’ve torn it at the corner.

Finally, I got to try G. Lalo’s double bordered correspondence cards in a really cool shade of hydrangea and gray. These are slick and almost feel like wall calendar paper. I couldn’t figure out which pen or ink to use because I was afraid it would slide right off. They do seem to be meant for fountain pens, however, because it dried quickly and didn’t smudge. I’ve included a picture of the G. Lalo hallmark embossing that comes on every envelope. I’d never gotten to write on this brand before, but I have pen pals who send me letters on it, so I’m used to seeing that mark on the envelope. :) I will say that I really like that the envelopes are lined—whenever I send out letters on Crane & Co., I cringe a little because I can see right through the sealed envelope and read what’s inside!

Thanks a bunch, Sunny, I had fun reviewing these! You can buy the Vergé de France 50-page tablets at Goulet Pen Company and the packets of correspondence cards around the web. 

On Friday I received a surprise package from Sunny Huang with Exaclair in New York—I remember signing up for a giveaway, so I think I won? :) Anyway, I got this nice green pocket notebook from the 1951 vintage collection and thought I’d put up a review.

This is the small notebook 3.5x5.5”, same in size to the Moleskine and Field Notebook pocket cahiers. It comes with 90g paper but has a textured cardstock cover. You can see in the last photo that I have a blue medium sized notebook that I bought; the smaller kind is gluebound and has a flat square spine while the medium size is staplebound and folded.

These notebooks have the same smooth writing surface that all Clairefontaines have, with no bleedthrough or echo. I haven’t tried out the label space on the front cover, but am curious to know how it’ll react to a fountain pen.

My only concern with this smaller notebook size is that because it’s gluebound, it doesn’t lay flat and it’s hard to use all the available space inside. Clairefontaine paper is of course wonderful to write on, but its one caveat is that it has a noticeable dry time. If you wanted to use this exclusively with a fountain pen, you’d have to wait for your words to dry before flipping the page because it doesn’t take very long to write from top to bottom. But writing with a ballpoint pen wouldn’t be any fun or really use the paper to its best advantage or purpose, so I’d pick a quick drying pen or be prepared to see some blotting remnants on the previous page.

That said, the smaller notebook would make an excellent book for grocery lists, to-dos, or the GTD system. It comes in 7 colors and has 64 lined sheets (128 pages) inside. Thanks Sunny!