What’s new with the laboratory-inspired aesthetic? This month – pen and ink!
6th September 2017
We’ve been delighted to notice that the laboratory-inspired aesthetic is gaining momentum across several sectors (especially in food and beauty, but more about one of those next time.) Today we’d like to share the stories of three of our lovely pen and ink customers.
Catherine from The Sakura Fountain Pen Gallery in Belgium says, “True, a pen business is not a laboratory. People do not only write with ink, they doodle, sketch, paint, they talk about it.”
Catherine stocks more than 1000 bottles of ink in 350 different colours, so she’s a passionate advocate of pen and ink. The inks she stocks are by Australian manufacturer Robert Oster Signature Inks, which she loves. In fact, she recently hosted an opportunity for her customers to try the 85 colours she stocks with an event called, “An Australian Ink Bar.”
People had great fun testing colours with cotton swabs, glass pens, fountain pens and brushes. Catherine used tubes and pipettes and a foam rack from The Consumables Company to divide the inks into several containers to prevent cross contamination of colours.
Catherine is collaborating with another one of our customer’s, Nick Stewart. Nick is a renowned international fountain pen ink artist and author of the blog quinkandbleach. Nick and Catherine are hosting a fountain pen ink workshop on 23rd September in Sakura’s Belgian store. You can read more here.
Catherine continues, “Today thousands of people are fascinated by ink. Online and offline. Ink is a game changer. Ink is a liquid that allows you to write or draw. But ink means also: colour, nuances, saturation, shade, sheen, wet, dry, waterproof, bulletproof, lightfast, feathering, bleeding, ghosting, passion, artistry, writing, reading, painting….”
Closer to home, this week on Radio 4’s Fry’s English Delight Stephen Fry and his guests investigated how ‘handmade physical text’ offers evidence about who created particular texts and why. They also discussed whether the move to digital text from physical writing robs English of ‘a personality which enhances the experience of writing and reading.’ One of the contributors to this interesting programme was Philip Hensher, author of ‘The Missing Ink.’ In it he writes: “I’ve come to the conclusion that handwriting is good for us. It involves us in a relationship with the written word which is sensuous, immediate, and individual. It opens our personality out to the world.”
We are sure that the next customer we are featuring this month would second these words from Hensher. Tom Gyr is a skilled designer maker, based in Dorset. Married to a calligrapher, Tom decided to create beautiful pens that his wife would love using. He explains, “I want to make pens that you will feel proud of using every day, with every detail considered, lovingly crafted from materials that will last several lifetimes.” Tom’s pens are now stocked in Harrods and Quill London, as well as through his own website. Tom lovingly packages his beautiful pens using test tubes from The Consumables Company.
We are so thrilled with the way that our products are being used in non-traditional ways and next time we’ll be featuring a fabulous food company that delights in using our pipettes and syringes in a creative way, you’ll be amazed!
