Paper Mate Flair Ultra Fine Point Pens

These Paper Mate Flair felt tip pens in Ultra Fine Point are becoming my favorite go-to pens for everyday use. I bought a pack of eight from Amazon -- all the local shops seem to carry only the medium point variety.  They're probably not perfect for every sort of paper, but on the fairly heavy-weight paper in these ECOeverywhere notebooks, they work very nicely.

I don't notice much feathering -- well, maybe just a bit.  And hardly any show-through on the back of the page -- actually, none that I can see.  As I say, thinner paper might prove more of a problem (haven't tried them in my Filofax yet).

I'm not an artist, so I don't know how they'd be for drawing with -- but I know they're pretty good for doodling:

Note: I have no affiliation with Paper Mate, ECOeverywhere, or Amazon; these opinions are my own and were not solicited or encouraged by any commercial entity.

Enough With the Diaries Already!

Following up on my last post, about my search for diaries for next year and the last two months of this year....

(Yes, I know you've all been on the edge of your seats out there, just waiting breathlessly for the next installment. The excitement in the air is positively tangible!)

Seriously folks, I have devoted an annoyingly huge amount of my time to this problem these last few weeks.  Finally found the elusive daily diary for 2013 (see the post about it here), but that still left me with two months of 2012 to cover (my current diary only made it to the end of October).  So I was in something of a quandary.  (Which is right next to a kankedort, and a painful position in which to find oneself, believe me.)

But (drum roll, please) after much searching and comparing and hemming and hawing -- I think I've found my book. When I was surfing Amazon, I discovered ECOeverywhere, a line of journals, sketchbooks, and photo albums created by Sun Graphix.  All recycled material (which is good), and made in the USA (which is even better).  Dozens of gorgeous cover designs available, and the journals were the perfect size (about 7.5 by 8.5 inches).  And they were really inexpensive, too!  Couldn't resist that, so I ordered a few just to test.

That one on top is adorable, isn't it?  Haven't decided on a use for it yet.  And the one pictured below, I bought just because I collect Alice in Wonderland books and ephemera, so I had to have this one:

And here's the one I'll be using as my diary for November and December (called "Autumn Leaves"):

The back cover is just as cute as the front (the back says 2011, Helen Dardik, so I'm assuming that's the designer's name):

They have a Smyth sewn binding so they lay pretty flat for writing, and the spine is a nice coordinating color:

Here's a shot of the inside pages:

Each page has the little green leaf graphic down in the corner at the bottom -- cute, but I think I'd rather have that space for writing.  Also, the paper seems OK -- not quite as smooth as I'd like, but the Quo Vadis diary I've been using has probably made me over-finicky about paper quality.  This should be fine.  The specs on Amazon say it's acid free, but I can't find anything in the actual product that makes that claim -- just that it's 100% recycled.  Each one has 80 sheets, making them 160 pages, front and back.  And the lines are made of light green dots -- not sure how I'm going to like that.  I think I'm OK with the green -- the dots...maybe not so much.

Anyway, at $4 apiece, I thought they were a great buy.  I checked Amazon just now and found that they've gone up to more than double that price, which is way more than I'd pay for one.  So I guess I just got lucky with these.  Now I just need to do something interesting enough to write about!