Diamine Sargasso Sea

Two amazing and wonderful things happen today:

1.  I got a new camera lens in the mail. I’m not really a sophisticated camera photographer type of person, I’m more of the point and shoot type, but let me tell you, it’s kind of hard to keep up a blog when you don’t have a camera. And let me tell you, those Henry’s people are pretty patient with people who don’t know anything about cameras, haha.

2. We’re releasing our precious Diamine inks into the wild, from their long winter captivity – we’re going to be shipping them again online.
We’re easing off on the siphoning a bit for some of the other inks, although we are keeping tabs on the weather across the country. We’re not yet getting shipments of Diamine in, as the weather will need to warm up a bit before our distributor gets in inks from over the way. If you’ve got a special order Diamine ink you’d like to see, it’ll still be a bit yet, I’m afraid.

And spring! Fresh weather! A young babe’s cheeks! Covered in gobs of beet puree! To celebrate all this and more, I’m taking a closer look at one of my favourite Diamine inks, Sargasso Sea.

The pen is a Lamy ABC with a fine nib, and the paper is a Life Stenographer’s Pad.

I have a thing for blue inks, just something about that classic blue for fountain pens, but this is really one of my favourite blues. It’s smooth, and flowing, it has just that right consistency between the nib and the paper. It’s a wet ink.

Sargasso Sea is on the darker side of blue, while certainly not being any sort of Navy or Blue-Black. It’s rich and saturated and deep, without being so dark that you can’t see the flavour.

 

This is an ink for ink lovers. There’s ink for the office, and ink for signing your marriage certificate, but Sargasso Sea is an ink for people who can appreciate a good ink.

This is also, however, not an ink that is good for sitting in your pen for too long, like most super saturated inks. It’s not going to be like a carbon ink, like Kiwa Guro, where if it dries, it really dries up in there, but inks that are more saturated are so because of a higher concentration of dyes. This also means a bit more flushing to get it really cleaned out of a pen after you’ve used it.

However, there’s no kidding around. The best part of this ink is that red sheen. It’s less noticeable and much harder to capture on camera if you’ve got a fine nib (like in my writing sample) or a really dry nib.

If you’re using a medium or broad nib, and especially on higher quality paper, the sheen is there, calling your name, along with mine.

To do my part to show you what I mean, I did a writing sample with a dip pen below.

Diamine Sargasso Sea is one of my favourite blues. I’m pretty sure at a certain point you can reach your capacity for inks, but I don’t know if the ink counts if it has sheen.