There’s a lot to like about Dabble. And very little to dislike. Let me start with what I like.
Dabble has an app that works offline and stores copies of your project locally, which automatically saves to the Dabble servers/cloud. It works pretty well too. I noticed very little functionality drop off when I wrote during my lunch breaks at my old DayJob. The wifi there was a joke and bumped me off repeatedly and often. It would save locally and once I was back in distraction mode, it would let me know that the project was saved locally, it would also let me know when it would update to the cloud. I have to admit that this feature really made me feel secure about the safety of my project. Though I admit that I’m someone who doesn’t trust software to be right all the time and I saved Word copies of my project to my machine pretty frequently.

Exporting a document to Word or Text file is as easy as clicking the right button. Once you click the button it gives you the option to change the file name and where to save it. Easy. From there it can be easily moved to another cloud service like Dropbox or Docs.

I also find the distraction free mode to work very well, especially when I’m out and about on my laptop and don’t have a second screen going. In full screen mode the Dabble interface obscures everything and then grays out. Though if you move your cursor via touchpad or mouse the window enters active mode again. This wasn’t much of an issue for me in my use.

A thing that I have found especially useful is the “Scene Notes” feature. At the start of each chapter and scene you are given a spot to write a short line about the scene. This shows up on the right hand side of the screen as you work and gives a good idea of what the current chapter and scene you are working on. I’ve found this a great way to keep myself focused on that particular scene. Adding a new scene is obscenely easy. You can add a new scene in the plot section by clicking the note card or by clicking on any chapter and selection “add new scene.”

Adding a new chapter is accomplished in much the same manner, though one must click the top most file- the project name and select add a chapter.

Let’s imaging that you have 12 chapters in a current project and while you are in Chapter 8 you realize that you will need a scene added back in chapter 2 to make your current scene make sense. So on the fly you add in a new scene, for chapter 2 but it lands in Chapter 8. Because you know what needs to be written, you write it right there, in Chapter 8. Yikes! Nope, not at all, simply click and drag that new scene into place. Then it will seamlessly drop into place.
Project settings are set by clicking the cleverly names “project settings” icon at the top left of the screen. This lets you decide the set up of your project as you work on it. I tend to just use the presets. Dabble let’s you customize your experience a bit, but this is set in the personal tab on the upper right. I prefer dark mode as it seems to work better for my eyes and working style over the default.

Dabble has dark mode as an offering for standard and premium subscribers and not their basic and I’ve complained before about other companies not adding it in as part of their basic package. I’ll make my standard complaint here- dark mode should be offered as standard on all platforms offering it. Why? from a user design standpoint it is friendly to offer a design feature as standard if it assists people with different abilities.

I use plot and story notes a bit differently than most people. I rarely touch the story notes section as much of my writing lacks characters or world building. But I do use Plot Notes. As you’ve seen in previous screen shots these work much like notecards. Though you can only move the cards around in their own line.

Getting rid of scenes and unused cards is easy, just click on the 3 dots at the end of each scene or card and “move to trash.” You can then click on trash to see them there. You can then change your mind and move them back.

Goals & Stats is easy to set up and use. With just a few spots to fill in the resulting bar graph on the right of the Dabble window allows you to mouse over that day’s bar and get a word count for that day. Also when in active mode, you can see the word count at the bottom of the text window. This number reflects what you’ve written in THAT scene that day and over all. It also give you a page count.

The only issues that I’ve stumbled upon is that on my former employer’s broken Wi-Fi sometimes spellcheck didn’t work properly, but for the most part Dabble just works. The other issue is that if you decide to move a 50K novel from say Google docs through cut an pasting into Dabble, well, expect there to be some issues. Even downloading from google to a word doc and then uploading produced a few errors. I suspect that using the local app on your computer for an upload of that size would cause fewer issues. But I had a heck of a time getting my NaNo novel into Dabble.

Pricing for Dabble isn’t bad at all, especially if you purchase a full year at once. If you win NaNoWriMo you can get an additional discount for a year’s subscription. This is pretty standard for any company that supports NaNoWriMo, though the discount changes from company to company.

Overall I find Dabble to be an incredibly useful tool for writing. It had fewer features than a few others out there, but it works smoothly and flawlessly most of the time. Learning it was easy since the structure mimics standard files structures and will look familiar to most people. If you plan to do NaNoWriMo this year consider their NaNo trial. It’s well worth the effort.

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I gave myself some rules for composition book round up 2021- NO POLY Covers. I struggled with it in the last few round ups. I hate poly covers. With a comp book there is little need for them. The card covers survive in a bag and take a beating, and look great as they get worn. Poly covers are simply unnecessary. Plus I really don’t want to add more plastic into the environment. I like the idea that my notebooks can be composted or burnt when I’m gone.

I picked up 3 composition books at Target this year. Many of the same offerings were available- from the awful Jalapeno Paper Company to Yoobi to Unison. I picked up a couple of books I hadn’t seen before and a stalwart companion.

Yoobi x Marvel $2.99

Yoobi is our steadfast comp book. Every year they introduce fun covers and they use the same great paper- if you use gel, ballpoint, or pencils. It’s not terrible for fountain pens though it does have bleeding issues. The Yoobi paper is stellar for pencils. It’s got just the right tooth and smoothness without being slick. It’s also got the gold standard of 100 sheets or 200 pages. Despite historically not being great with fountain pens this is a go to comp book for me. I just love the covers. The covers are sturdy, though not as sturdy as in past years. 

This year, my nephew is getting the Spidey Yoobi composition book. I picked out the red foil web on a red background with the white jagged info area. The Yoobi x Marvel has super cute covers with really cute stylized characters from Marvel.

Up & Up $0.69

Generally I’ve skipped over the pulpy textured Up & Up books because they sport poly covers. Imagine my surprise at finding them with card covers!

The card covers are thin and flexy. You won’t be writing out of hand with this book. The cover is subtly printed with narrow lines of a lighter tone than the background. In this case dark gray on dark blue. It’s a subtle pattern. It’s not a classic. That said, in the lighter colors, this would be a stellar notebook cover for doodles. I only saw black, red, and blue. Though to be fair the composition notebook section was a mess of piles and mashed together books. Customers had already thrashed the place.

The subtle design is where everything good ends in this book. The paper is thin and slick. Everything slides off it’s surface. There’s no tooth for pencil. Even my 4b NanoDia lead was pale gray and washed out looking. To get a decent mark from HB pencils I had to jam the point into the page. Ballpoint feels like crap. Gel feels okay but even a Pilot G2 bleeds through. Fountain pen feels okay but the paper soaks ink into it like blotter paper.

It’s 69 cents,  but you can only use half the book. Worse yet they only have 70 sheets. For those of you keeping track, that’s about a penny a sheet. These are as terrible as their poly covered counterparts, but at least you can compost it. 

Better Together $2.99

These are pricey, but the company partners with Classroom.org to donate money to schools in need. They also identify the designers by name and picture in the back of the book! Awesome. The cover is a bit thin and lacks spine tape, but the spine is carefully scored so it bends and folds better than most comp books!

I grabbed this for it’s bright colorful cover and THICK but smooth paper. The paper is incredibly thick, surprisingly so. At 148 pages or 70 sheets it’s a fat notebook. Especially when you compare it to the other 70 sheet comps out there. It’s at least twice as thick as the Up & Up.

I had low expectations going into this. After all, I’ve been historically disappointed by designer covered comps. In this case the paper is really nice. There isn’t any bleeding or show through and no feathering! It has nice tooth but fountain pens feel good on it. I only have one pen, a TWSBI Eco with a particularly sharp nib, that grabbed the surface. Even my other EF pens felt good. It also fared well with brush pens! No bleed and no show through at all.

For good measure I brought out my Pentel Color brush- a fat inky brush type pen that lays down an inch wide wet swath of ink. No problem. I’m not suggesting you go ahead and buy this for watercolor work, but if you decide to hit it up with some wet markers, it might not be awful.

The surface is also AMAZING for pencil, up there with Yoobi notebooks. It’s got an exceptional tooth that makes even a generic HB look nice and dark but isn’t like writing on rough sandpaper. 

To make this beauty even better, the stitching is exceptional. It’s tight and back tacked for exceptional sturdiness. The thread is color coordinated. In this case it’s neon PINK.

Overall this is a fantastic choice if you want something bright and colorful that accepts fountain pens, brush pens, pencils, and seemingly everything I tossed at it. The only downside is that the cover is thin and it lacks spine tape, which I honestly think is a necessary feature of comp books. At $2.99 it’s pretty pricey, especially when compared to other brands that sell for far less. That said, getting a comp book with thick paper that handles fountain pens and brush pens well is a bit surprising.

As far as winners at Target, the unison, which isn’t reviewed here, but was reviewed here, is always a solid choice. They tend to have them very cheap later in the BTSS season and at clearance time you can score a handful. The Yoobi is always a solid choice if you stick to ballpoint and pencil. As far as everything else? Well, the Better Together is solid, plus they have fun colorful covers and colored stitching. 

Limiting the comp round up to only card covers has made the selection pretty difficult. I’m not sure what the other places will have to offer.

If you’ve been enjoying the blog for any period of time you know how much I enjoy zines. What isn’t to like? Someone writes about something they are passionate about, so passionate about it that they then compile it into a booklet and self publish and sell it, often at a loss. Friend of the blog, Johnny of Pencil Revolution, is one such zinester.

His most recent zine project, The Pen Post is fantastic. There is a lot to love about it. I arrived folded like an old fashioned newspaper but smaller. The format reminds me of the free papers you can find in all those little boxes at train stations and outside grocery stores. 

Inside the zine is loaded with fun pen information and articles. Johnny has enlisted an assortment of friends to write for the zine. The intro is written by none other than the Pen Addict himself, Brad Dowdy. Andy Welfle details his search for the perfect green fountain pen ink.

Anyway, the zine is a lot of fun and looks really great, and I look forward to future issues. Get a copy on etsy soon.  Continue reading →

We try not to buy a lot of things in plastic packages that are already in plastic packages. But sometimes it happens. Now I have a way to reuse that packaging that will never get recycled.

Plastic makes a great matrix for dry point. Many people use thin acetate sheets, like the stuff that was used with overheard projectors. You can run them through a printer and print your design on them, well plastic packaging can’t be run through a printer and it’s a bit thicker, but it works great.

I left the packaging intact, enjoying the idea of reuse juxtaposed with the living flowers and representation of death with the skull- on a polluting piece of plastic.

I can see where I went wrong with this plastic, areas didn’t need to be so deeply scraped and etched. The lines held up surprisingly well for many passes through the press. Generally dry point plates don’t last a long time, but I managed to run this one through 10 times for 8 good prints! (I managed to damage it when I scraped off ink with a credit card that had a bit of sand on it.)

I used an Exacto blade, upside down, blade pointed up so that the tip and back of the blade scraped through the plastic. It worked really well. The next plastic package I get I’ll be trying my needles.

You can see on the left of the skull where it is a bit over worked and the ink couldn’t be wiped away.Anyway, really excited by this particular reuse.

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I had a grand idea- and it has given me some printmaking woes!

The idea was simple- combine my bad brains relief blocks with dendritic monoprints. The look is AMAZING. The process works okay. I kinda like how the texture of the thick acrylic paint breaks up the thick black of the relief print. Next time around I’ll use a thinner more liquid paint though.

The woe? It does not want to dry, at all. I’ve written a few Insta posts that my relief prints using Speedball Supergraphic Black ink looks great but take forever to dry, it turns out that my studio is just too humid. So I’ve been using the car baking method of print drying- the prints get spread out in the back of my car to dry. Depending on the weather and length of time I’ve dried them in the basement, it takes anywhere from 8 hours to 2 days for them to dry.

So the bad brains in my car now- the brains printed on paper? Dry and perfect. Brain bits on the glossy thick acrylic paint? Still slick.

I might need to break down and pick up some cobalt or other drying agent to get this ink to actually dry. I really want to avoid using those since they are wildly poisonous. No matter what I do I end up with ink on my hands. I’m also going to try a few other water soluble oil based inks. I tried the Speedball fabric ink, in brown, and even without heat it did dry.

Narwhal Yellow Tang fountain pens popped up on my radar towards the end of 2020, and like many things in 2020, they stayed there on the edges of my vision, not being capitalized upon. Though they were in the running as a celebratory pen for purchase when I snagged my new job. When Goldspot reached out and offered me one to review I jumped on it fast! The little bubble wrapped package arrived in my mailbox a week or so later and I wasted no time cutting it open and peeking at the contents. I’d left it up to Goldspot to pick a color, though I was tempted to request a demonstrator. I am very pleased with the Yellow Tang original that arrived.

The packaging is understated but also giftable. While I appreciate a nice gift box, I appreciate being able to recycle the box more. It’s simple with modest and cute branding. The card box is lined with thick foam that holds the pen and wrench secure for transportation. I like it.

The yellow and white swirled acrylic is lovely and vibrant. While gold nibs and furniture aren’t my favorites I think silver would look odd on a yellow pen and the accents of gold trim look great on this acrylic. I almost regret that I filled it with with black ink, but even boring black ink (for sketching) it looks amazing. The yellow and white pop against the darkness of the ink. The piston moves effortlessly and takes a deep fill of ink. Usually I measure the fill, but I really just wanted to get it filled so I could draw.

In use I find that the pen is a nice size and not too heavy. I don’t usually post my caps and though the cap on the Narwhal is technically postable, I found that it made the pen off balanced and overly long. The clip allowed me to attach the pen to my sketchbook or into my pen case for safe keeping. It’s sturdy and feels as though it will last.

I’ve used this pen for awhile now and it lays down a generous but not too wet line of ink that works great for writing and sketching. it doesn’t seem to dry out when I let it sit while I use my brush pen for a few minutes to blur and blend lines.

Overall I really like the pen. The nib is great and a nice size and the acrylic pops. Even their special edition acrylics are affordable. At $50 it’s not cheap but more along the lines of Moonman or even the TWSBI Eco. I have to say that when it is compared to the Eco, I like the style of the Narwhal better. I like the overall color scheme and the fact that it feels a bit more sleek. It is a pretty traditional fountain pen style, the original in black would fit in anywhere, while the fun colors offer a bit of fun to any writing or sketching experience. When compared to Moonman, Narwhal stands out as their designs are classics and not riffs on another company’s designs. They don’t feel like a mishmash of ideas hastily tossed together. This pen also feels of higher overall quality. If you are looking for a piston filling pen for sketching, the fine nibbed Narwhal stands out as a solid choice.

Narwhal as a company stands out from the field of less expensive fountain pens in that the company backs up its products and if you head to their website you can see the owners. I like the idea that I’m supporting a small company and even specific people, that stand behind their products. That feels important to me as a consumer and reviewer. *

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One of my art loves is print making, it combines well with bookbinding and allows the artist to make many copies of the art work. What isn’t to love?

A few years back my friend Jane and I spent a weekend setting up and making gelatin plates, and shortly after I read Linda Germain’s post about plasticizing the gelatin for longer lasting plates. Her blog has stayed on my Old Reader and Feedly feeds since then.

Recently she wrote about pressing flowers in a little die cutter and embosser tool. She linked to an old post where she wrote about using it as an etching, litho, and all around mini press.
MIND BLOWN.

I immediately took to the inter-tubes to see if I could find one of my own. The brand she suggested is hard to find and very expensive now. Instead I found a similar model by a different brand on clearance. It should arrive this week and I hope to play with it a bit when i finish getting my garden ready.

Most of the brands seem to have a press bed of 6 inches by 12 inches. Perfect for half of a standard American letter sized sheet of paper. This is a good size for my use- I like to work small anyway, and the small portable size means I can stash it just about anywhere.

If you decide to make a purchase of one of these presses for yourself look for a die cutter/embosser with adjustable pressure. Either on the top or the side opposite the crank handle there will be a knob. Most companies will have this emblazoned on their boxes. You can use one that is not adjustable, but you’ll have to adjust pressure with addition blankets and shims, which is annoying.

Anyway, check out Germain’s blog, it’s excellent.

No links to the ‘zon on this one.

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