Spotlight Stationery July 2016 Box Review

Yes, the above pic may or may not contain spoilers ;) But July box is sold out and the August boxes have been shipped, so this review has been a little bit over due but I wanted to share it and my thoughts about it with you at any rate. 

I've been following Spotlight Stationery (a (bi)monthly stationery subscription box service based in the UK) on Instagram for a while now and then they posted a while back that they still had one July box left, I grabbed that chance with both hands (also because the spoiler photo had something Turquoise in it and yeah how can I let that pass me by?!) Mary from Spotlight Stationery crew kindly let me buy the box as a one-off, which I really appreciate as I was on the fence to get a subscription right away. So thank you again, Mary! The boxes are 25£ plus postage and packaging (UK: £2.00 Europe: £5.25 Rest of the world: £7.50) So I paid the equivalent of 36€ including PP and a few days later I had this waiting for me in my mailbox:

It looked well stuffed and I was beyond excited to open it!

The goodies came in nicely packaged in tissue paper and looks very stylish with their logo and slogan "Indulge your passion for stationery" which I certainly did!

And these are the contents of the July box; I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was Rhodia themed!

The set included (pricing is based on uk webstore prices upon googling the items): 2 staple bound small pocket notebooks (grid) (2£ for both), triangle orange pencil (1,50£), soft black leather pencil case (10£ but a seemingly hard item to find as it's out of stock in most stores...) and the turquoise thing I was so curious about is a soft cover Rhodiarama A5 notebook in dot grid (13,75£) which I always wanted to try out! So I was super thrilled to find that in the box. Also I have to note that this was a departure from their usual boxes as they made it themed based on a brand. I definitely like this idea and I hope they will do that again in the future!

What I also like about this subscription box is that you get an assortment of postcards by young/up and coming artists along with it. There are some really talented people out there and I always love to support indie illustrators and by getting a Spotlight Stationery box you are also helping a charity. For every box they ship they will make a donation to National Star, a charity working with young people with disabilities and acquired brain injuries. I don't know about you, but for me this does lessen the guilt of buying or as they put it "indulging" in buying more stationery. Well played Spotlight Stationery team, well played!

I am definitely happy with the content of my first ever (no I kid you not!) surprise stationery box purchase. (I haven't done subscriptions ever since I stopped with the Inkdrop offered by Goulet pens back in the day) I definitely think that the cost of the box is well worth the content in this case. The summed up amount is 27,50£ and that isn't even included the postcards. Lets say those are 2£ each and then the total would be 35,25£ which what you pay for the box incl. shipping to the EU! So if you like the content of the box as much as I do it is definitely worth it IMHO. 

The question I am struggling with though is will I get a subscription? Will I indeed subscribe to indulge in my stationery needs? The thing is, while I do like surprises, I also like knowing what I will get and what I like about Spotlight Stationery they also offer their past boxes as a one-off buy. I have not made up my mind about this yet, but as I typed this I have noticed they still had one of the August boxes left! Which is a total surprise as I have not seen any spoiler pics of the content yet. So I went ahead and got that one as well and I'm going to wait and see the August box content before I do subscribe. 

If you want to subscribe, when you register for their email news letter, you will get a discount code for 15% off on your first box. Yeah I also have no idea what I am waiting for really, it's such a good deal... maybe it's the fact that I am still thinking - do I really need all this stationery as my closets are overflowing with notebooks I have not even used yet. Well maybe I should make a conscious effort to do so and do some more stationery related reviews!

At any rate, I hope this review was useful to you if you are considering to subscribe to the Spotlight Stationery box yourself. Thanks for stopping by and have great day!

namasté

Disclaimer: I was not in any way compensated by Spotlight Stationery for this review. There are no affiliated links and the opinions reflected above are completely my own. 

Pens and Ink: Omas Lucens with Omas Sepia

Returning to an Omas pair up this week.  This pen was one of my purchases at the Tilburg Penshow last year. The pen is a vintage Omas Lucens and has an amazing stub nib on it. Even though it did cost me a pretty penny, it simply had to go home with me. 

I paired it with Omas Sepia, a gorgeous vintage looking brown with a lot of character, just what this pens needs! First some more info on this pen.

 

The pen has a beautiful black and amber transparent body and the engraving for such an old pen is pretty crisp on it. I found a vintage Omas booklet where these pens were described and I'll share the pages here.

The Omas Lucens has a cylindrical shape and the Omas Lucens Extra has facets as you can see below. My pen doesn't have the art deco ring band on the cap so it means it's from a later production.

The arrow clip sure does look a lot like a parker pen, doesn't it? The nib also has an arrow on it, but I can tell you that these Omas nibs are really not comparable to the parker ones!

There was a wide assortment of nibs on the Omas Lucens fountain pens. You can say the nib I have on mine is "extra Grosso" seeing the line variation it can produce, it's definitely larger than the width shown here. It's a vacuum filler pen, so it does take a bit of fiddling to get the pen working properly. But when it does, oh such lovely writing!

The pens surely does have some start up issues, but I got it fully working and wrote a page in my loving kindness metta meditation journal with it.

The wide stub nib shows a nice line variation and the shading of the ink pretty well. It's got a gorgeous coffee brown color to it. This pen lays down a lot of ink but Claire fontaine paper is a trooper, held up really well!

The nib is pretty difficult to whield I must say. Even though it flexes, perhaps it's not what you're supposed to with it. When I flex the nib, the ink flow just stops completely, but when you write normally, without too much pressure, the ink flow keeps up pretty nicely. Maybe I need to reset the feed (I heat set it a few times but still didn't work) but I am hesitant taking this pen apart seeing everything else works well. And vacuum fillers are fickle pens to fiddle around with!

About the ink, it's a beautiful vintage brown color with great depth. I'm glad I snagged a bottle of this at akkerman with Omas Turquoise when I had the chance!

I like to experiment with fountain pen inks in my art so it's fun to test and try different things with the ink. And with this ink I noticed that when you let it dry naturally it's dries up a reddish brown, as you see the ink smear above. When you apply a heat gun to the ink to dry it, it becomes a more burnt umber color, as you can on the writing below. That's pretty fun to see the different characteristics to an ink!

It's definitely a gorgeous pen and such a beautiful writer (when you can get it to work properly) but it's not a daily carry due to it's fickle filling system and start up problems. I think this is the first pen that I actually got because I wanted it in my collection and not necessarily to write with. But it's fun to take it out once in a while and take her out for a drive :) 

Hope you enjoyed this week's pairing. Next week an iconic Bauhaus style fountain pen and some great news on a returning ink company! 
Thanks for stopping by & have a great day!

namasté

Paper goods: Papelote Notebook Cover & Clairefointaine 1951 vintage notebook

It was a beautiful day out and we decided to make good use of it and go to the beach. The perfect opportunity to test out the great Papelote A5 Notebook Cover outdoors! This notebook cover, together with the Clairefontaine 1951 retro cloth bound notebook was so kindly sent to me by Mishka from Bureau Direct for review purposes! Thank you so much Mishka!!

The papelote notebook cover is made with soft cotton cloth and comes in various designs. I was sent the red and white striped with blue inseam cover. A lovely combination! The cover has an elastic strap attached to it, which can hold 5 writing utensils. It comes with a pencil to get you started. You can see the array of items I've chosen to carry with it; a few fine Steadtler fine liners, a faber castell brush marker, sakura gelly roll pen and a water brush pen. The size I have here is the A5 size, which can fit any A5 size notebooks like the Leuchtturm 1917 and Rhodia notebooks. I chose the Clairefontaine 1951 vintage style notebooks, because of the fact it has fountain pen friendly paper and well just look at it.

It's pretty and it's turquoise! They come in 3 different sizes, the pocket size, A5 exercise and A5 clothbound books. I got to test them all and they fit in very nicely in the notebook cover.  

 Also I used some fun journal rubber stamps to categorize my notebooks :) 

Fun fact, Bureau Direct also offers the pocket books in a fun compilation with the J. Herbin rollerball pen and ink cartridges. The turquoise set comes with J. Herbin Bleu Pervence turquoise ink cartridges. They also have the bottled ink here. A scrumptious set for a turquoise fanatic like me :D

Anyhow, back to the notebook cover! You can carry a lot of tools inside the cover besides just the notebook due to the flexibility of the soft cotton cloth cover!

Look at that! Doesn't that look scrumptious?? Yes, the brownie was really yummy as well ;) So what did I take with me in my notebook cover? Take a look below:

I tucked in a pack of water color pencils, a pocket size coloring book, the Lamy Safari Dark Lilac (see my pens and ink post about it here), a pocket sketchbook and...

An A5 Clipboard! The cover has a seem opening on the back where you can tuck this baby in! I found this discovery brilliant as you can add sturdiness to the cover which allows you to sit down anywhere and write, draw, color or whatever on the go! I already had this one, but Bureau Direct are selling these clipboards by Penco as well. So what do I use my clairefontaine journal for? I use it as my Daily Gratitude and Loving Kindness journal. You have seen shots of the pages in my Pens and Ink post, surely. Every morning (or at least I try to) I write down the loving kindness meditation to set the tone for Compassion for the day. I will write another post about this type of journaling at a later point, but let me show you a page as a reminder.

As I said before, the paper in clairefontaine books hold fountain pen inks really well. It's definitely one of my preferred notebooks for journalling as I love the line spacing (7mm) for my handwriting and the smoothness of the paper lets the nibs just glide over the paper. 

In conclusion: The combination of the Papelote Notebook Cover with these Clairefontaine 1951 notebooks is a wonderful thing! I thoroughly enjoyed using cover. A major plus point being the flexibility of it. Also a great thing about the fact that it's a cloth cover is that you can wash them quite easily if you spill any (non permanent) ink on it! The straps are mighty handy too! It works best if you have something sturdy in the cover like a clipboard or a hard cover notebook, though. If you are looking for only the notebook straps, Papelote also makes them separately which Bureau Direct also sells. Those work best on hard cover notebooks. 

Thanks again Mishka/ Bureau Direct, I've really improved on my daily writing sessions by having such a wonderful set up for it :) By the way, if you're looking into journalling yourself, and looking for something that might work for you, why don't you check out Stationery Wednesday as this month's spotlight falls on  the Bullet Journal. And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't already. Next to fun news, specials and competitions, it also contains a weekly discount code for 10% off your purchase at Bureau Direct shop! That's not something you'd want to miss out on!

Hopefully this review was useful to you and inspired you to go out and journal in the wide open :) 

Thanks for stopping by & have a great sunday!

namasté

(disclaimer: I got these items free of charge for review purposes and was not monetarily compensated. All opinions stated here are my own and there are no affiliate links.)