#8PenQuestions is a fun community hashtag created by fountain pen Youtubers Liane and Seemownay, designed to provide a series of question prompts for everyone to answer on their own channels. Liane and Seemownay created it for Youtube, but it’s spread to Instagram and beyond. You can check out the Youtube hashtag here and the Instagram hashtag here, and I thought it’d be fun to join in here on my blog.
1. When and how did your fountain pen journey begin?
You know, I can’t actually remember – not exactly. I’ve always been a stationery addict and I love colour, so fountain pens seem like the perfect fit for me.
As close as I can remember, I would have been in my late teens, shopping with my dad, and he bought himself a Lamy Safari. Whether I was inspired or imitating, I bought myself my first Safari too – the classic dark blue with black clip, which I still have today. (A bit battered, but much-loved.)
I have no idea what I used for ink; I didn’t get into colourful inks until a year or so later when my dad gave me a Rotring Altro (a very cool technical pen with an unusual tubular nib) and a whole swag of colourful cartridges in bright jewel tones. I loved that pen, and my University study notes were very colourful.
I never really got hooked, though, and drifted in and out of fountain pen use for a decade or two. I bought myself a few nice Safaris and Lamy inks and the odd other pen here and there (I’m still salty about the “fancy” pen I bought myself during that time, which probably went missing during an office move years ago) but I put fountain pens away when I fell in love with Stone Paper, which is the least FP-friendly paper you can imagine. (It’s not absorbent, so ink never dries. It’s a nightmare.)
And then, sometime in late 2021, I noticed a friend posting a gorgeous ink-a-day to Facebook (a belated #30inks30days, I discovered later) and thought to myself “huh, I have a box of fountain pens and pretty inks I’m not using – I should pull those out and see what I’ve got”. I inked up a couple of my faves, found a local FP group on Facebook, promptly fell down the rabbit hole, and the rest is history. The rabbit hole is my home now.
