Author Archives: leslie

Review: Baron Fig Card Sleeve

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This review is a little outside my typical reviews. That said, I think you’ll appreciate it.

I have carried a front pocket wallet for many years. I started in college with a zippered card sleeve that was intended for student ID and maybe a few other cards, plus a zippered pocket for your cash. It was integrated into a keychain. I had several different versions over the years, but I always liked the form factor.

After I graduated I switched over to a card sleeve with an integrated cash clip. I liked these more but the clip always wore a hole into my jeans or irritated my leg. Around 3 or 4 years ago I switched over to a Cortier leather card fold, basically, 2 card sleeves linked that folds over on itself. Cortier is a Massachusetts based leather goods maker that has set my bar for all leather goods. Which is to say, my bar is set ridiculously high when it comes to leather goods. (WE could also talk about One Star Leather too. Or hell Galen Leather.)

The BF Card Sleeve (BFCS) arrives in perfect packaging, a little gray cardstock envelope. It looks lovely. Inside the wallet is swaddled in tissue paper, The presentation is perfect for gifts. I felt like I was opening a gift for myself.

I picked the gray and yellow colored wallet. The exterior is gray with bright mustard yellow inside. I love the coloration of the leather. I’ll make a few notes about the feel of the wallet. The maker uses a very different leather than most that make things by hand. This leather is crisp and stiff. Unlike most artisanal makers who use cordovan or shell leather which is supple soft and has an amazing hand feel, you won’t be petting this wallet. The stitching is thin and looks like regular machine stitching, unlike the thick thread I’m accustomed to seeing from the artisanal makers.

I admit I was skeptical that I’d like this card sleeve. It was too crisp too slim, too little. I was able to slip 9 cards into the various pockets. The interior slot seems to be sized for cash, but I’ve yet to carry any cash with it. Instead, I’ve got my license and insurance cards in that middle slot. One slot holds the 3 credit cards I use regular, the other my gas card, a loyalty card for the local cafe I love, and my library card.* Whe I went into Cambridge to visit a friend, I slid my Charlie card into one of the outter pockets, I was able to scan the card withoutremoving it from the sleeve. Perfection.

What I really love about this little card sleeve is that it is lightweight and disappears into my pocket. Unlike other card sleeves I’ve used, there isn’t anything that protrudes to wear unsightly holes in my denim, nor does it cause unseemly wallet bulges in my front pocket. It is lightweight and feels great. The stiff leather grips the cards well but allows for them to slide out with ease, but they don’t fall out.

You can get yours over at Baron Fig. At $35 it’s not a bad deal for a well-made card sleeve that really does disappear into your pocket. The hardest part of owning this wallet is figuring out what cards you are going to shove into it.

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Review: Semikolon Journal A6

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This journal or pocket notebook feature 64 leaves or 128 pages of blank cream-colored paper. It measures 105x148mm or 4.1×5.8 inches. In other words, pretty standard pocket-sized. The corners are sharp. The whole notebook is held together with 2 regular steel colored staples. The notebooks are available in several different colors and are shrink wrapped.

Mine is burgundy or brick red colored. It’s a nice vibrant color. The paper has a pleasing texture. The cover stock is the same weight as the interior pages, which doesn’t bode well for it doing well in a pocket. This is a book that will require a cover of some sort.

The paper inside is cream colored and has a laid texture, which is lovely. The paper responds very well to fountain pens, inks of all kinds, and all the pencils I tested. It’s really quite lovely. I look forward to sketching on its pages.

At Almost $5 for the little pocket-sized notebook, I’m not sure it is a great value. IF I had a cover that fits it, I may feel differently. But as it is, I just don’t feel like I’ll get enough bang for my buck on this notebook. Continue reading →

Review: MD Paper Products Pencil B Grade

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The Midori pencils have been around for awhile, and I snagged one in a swap but bought my first package of them while in Cambridge. You can find them online easily but also at Black INk in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

These pencils feature a cream colored matte finish over fabulously scented cedar. The imprint is in black and crisp. They are eraser less and the ends are not finished. Each end is ever so slightly domed. The domed ends are a lovely little detail, something I’ve come to expect from Midori products.

They sharpen well in every sharpener I’ve used, from Classroom Friendly to Masterpiece to Pollux. The cedar shaves off smoothly and the lead sharpens to a perfect point. The B grade core is darker and softer than many B grades. Compared to European pencils, like Staedtler I”d rate is a 3 or 4 B while in Japanese pencils I’d say it is closer to a Mitsubishi 2B. The core is silky smooth and reminds me of Mitsubishi pencils. It glides over the paper and lays down a nice dark line as I write. Sketching this pencil produces decent darks and lights, it won’t produce the darkest of darks, but it does a good enough job for general sketching.

These aren’t the cheapest of pencils. I picked up a 6-pack for almost $11, still cheaper than Blackwing Volumes and around the same price as the regular Blackwings, with a vastly different look. Continue reading →

Review: Ohto Sharp Pencil 0.5 Mechanical

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The Ohto Sharp Pencil (OSP form here) is wood cased with lovely cedar and designed to look like a standard number 2 pencil. The design mostly works, with a few little details that could work better.

First, let me tell you about the good parts of the OSP. The wood casing is the size of a regular number two pencil. It is lightly varnished with a clear satin finish. The imprint is black, crisp and looks fabulous. The “ferrule” is silver aluminum but is also available in brass, but more about that later. Seated in the ferrule is a cup, with a standard pink eraser.

At the working end, the pencil features a small brass cone and guide. If your pencil gets jammed up with broken leads you are SOL, the tip cannot be unscrewed to be cleared. I tried and the tip did not budge no matter how much I attempted to remove it. The interior mechanism appears to be made with a combination of metal and plastic. For less than $5 this is to be expected. Ohto makes a higher end version with a brass colored ferrule and no eraser. The interior appeared to be the same as the cheaper version, the big difference is the lack of eraser and brass coloration.

I find that the mechanism to work well. Leads deploy at roughly 0.5mm per click and the click while soft is satisfying. The supplied lead is smooth and appears to be a hard HB. I swapped mine out with some NanoDia in 2B which works wonderfully in this pencil.

The OSP 0.5 mechanical suffers from the same issues as the Ohto Sharp Pencil 2.0 mm, in that the eraser cup floats around in the ferrule and clicks as you write. The 2.0 mm version has a very small amount of room and required a quick wrap of sticky tape to solve the metal on metal click. The OSP has a larger amount of room and required a wrap with washi tape to solve the issue.

This points out a regular issue I have with many Ohto products- their half-assing their design and production. Ohto puts out lovely, really nice designs that fall flat in production values. This design is lovely, but the rattling of the eraser cup in the ferrule is beyond annoying. Solving this issue is as simple as a wrap of tape around the cup, but Ohto could solve the issue by inserting a plastic sleeve into the ferrule. I get that they are attempting to get their products into a certain price point (affordable/cheap) but I’d gladly pay an extra buck for this pencil without the issue. Let’s face it several other companies have made wood-cased mechanical pencils at much higher price points.

Overall, if you love wood-cased pencils and mechanicals this is a nice mashup, especially for $5. Does it perform as well as my Rotring 600? No, but I’m not going to use it for anything but notes and writing, not draughting fancy plans. Continue reading →

Review: Tofty Via Shapeways Refill Adapter

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I’ve been wanting a gel pen refill for my Squire since I got the thing. Don’t get me wrong I love the Schmidt P8126 refill that comes with them, but I love gel ink, particularly on the paper at work. As I’ve detailed before, my DayJob has the finest cheapest crappy printer paper, and everything bleeds on it. Gel pens seem to perform the best. Well, that and ballpoint.

After a chat with Ana of The Well-Appointed Desk, I tested out a bunch of the gel refills I had around on my desk. Only to continue the conversation (as pen nerds do) and find that Baron Fig had narrowed up the nose of the Squire and it will only accept a few refills, namely those with a tip roughly the same diameter of the P8126. This leaves you with using standard Parker type refills, and Parker does make a lovely gel refill that I destroy in under a week.

But in my discussion with Ana, she suggested Tofty and his adapters. I headed over to Shapeways and Tofty’s page and ordered a few adapters. I also ordered some Schmidt D1 ballpoint refills. D1 refills are a steal on the ‘Zon, I snagged a 10-pack for cheap. Are they the best? No. As far as ballpoints go, they aren’t bad. They write smoothly and don’t blob.

Anyway. The D1 refill slide into the adapter- BE CAREFUL the adapters should be snug and hold onto that refill like, well you make up your own metaphor/simile here, my mind isn’t going to good places. It takes a bit of effort to get the refill into the adapter but once it is in there, it STAYS in there. I found it helpful to get the refill started into the adapter, install it into my pen and then press the tip of the refill straight down into a pad of paper, which fully seats the refill every time. To remove the refill, take it out of the pen, hold the adapter in on hand and grip the D1 refill with a pair of plier and yank.

Like most of the Shapeways stuff, I’ve picked up… The plastic looks cheap, feel fragile, and gets filthy in moments. It doesn’t matter so much with these adapters because they live inside the pen and so long as it’s not a transparent pen, they are hidden. Thus far I’ve been using one inside a Squire for a few months and I’ve been happy with the change. It does its job well.

At $5.50 the price is… A little high in my mind. BUT over time and with 10 D1 refills over P8126 you’ll save a few bucks. Continue reading →

Interesting Stuff 20180615

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Reading:

CockyGate hits the courts. If you haven’t been following me on Twitter or listened to RSVP, then you don’t know that I’m obsessed with CockyGate and all that it could potentially mean for authors of all stripes. I love me a fight with a  trademark troll.

Reviews are often gatekeepers of content. We’re sent things to review. Often times we buy stuff to review. So often our review follow our whims and interests. It is no different in the land of books. Romance book reviews lean toward cishet f/m and overall what sells. That said, perhaps the romance publishing houses should look more closely at the sales of the indie and self-pubbed authors who are writing f/f and m/m or other romance novels. Just sayin’.

Want diversity in your reading choices? I know I do. I’d love to read more books with characters like myself, but those are few a far between. Penguin hopes to remedy that, somewhat with their new diversity initiative. Some authors are taking a myopic view of diversity. Good lord folks, level up or get out of the game.

Ear holes:

8-year old kid crushes some Zep and giggles about killing it at the end. I’ve got dust in my eye.

 

Review: Tofty via Shapeways Pen Clip

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This clip has been mentioned on RSVP multiple times yet I’ve failed to post a review. My thoughts on this clip are mixed.

I picked up the white processed versatile plastic. It’s got a rough finish I rather like but it looks filthy very quickly. For another $4.50 you can get a smoother premium plastic. White goes with everything, and given how many color variations Baron Fig has, black and white are the best choices (to me.)  The 9mm clip worked for me, but 8.5mm might also work with a snugger fit.

The part of the clip that wraps around your pen is delicate, BE CAREFUL when you slide the pen into it, or you might crush or crack it and it won’t work. Sigh. I’ve ordered 2 of these because the first clip I ordered was 10mm and too big and of course I crushed that one. Once you get the right size for your pen, the clip slides on and fits nicely at a good point on the BF Squire pen body. It doesn’t look great, but it is perfectly functional.

Scratch that. The Tofty clip is a wart on a beautiful pen body. It’s ugly AF and I hate it except for the fact that it means I can now use my Squires at work. My work environment means I’m up and moving around and I need to be able to grab my pen (clipped to the buttons of my shirt) quickly for notes. I can’t leave it on my desk in the Stone like I do when I’m at home. For work use, my pens MUST have a clip, and Tofty’s are ugly but functional and they won’t scratch the anodized finish like other slide on metal clips will. I won’t even look at the Peerless pencil clip as an option, that things scratch my fingers if I look at it wrong.

Anyway, if you can look past the aesthetics of the Tofty clips it is the only option for BF Squire that slides on securely. At $4.50 it’s not super cheap but it is affordable. Continue reading →

Interesting Stuff 20180608

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For Eyeballs:

Free online courses. I’m a big fan of teaching myself things. There are hundreds of great online course offered for free all over the place. This is a collection of hundreds. 

This art piece fills me with joy. I wish I could participate in something like it near me. Helium and charcoal ball.

I roast my own coffee. Sweet Maria’s has a good starter how to and loads of archived resources. There’s a forum somewhere.

For the Ear Holes:

Call Your Girlfriend, a super smart podcast with 2 lady co-hosts talking about all sorts of women’s issues, smartly. I’ve listened to almost all the episodes from ep 1, but the most recent years worth are the best.

Get to Work Hurley is a great podcast by the author Cameron Hurley. It’s smart, funny, and a pointed reminder that even published authors have a rough time. It’s decidedly NSFW as Hurley and I have a similar trucker like vocabulary.