My new favourite pen is this lovely German-made Diplomat Magnum, recently ordered from Goulet. This pen has it all: writes smoothly, never making me fear of torn paper, even papers that aren’t fountain-pen friendly; a wet tip that flows consistently with no need to adjust or prime even after many days unused; a light and easy feel in the hand and a slim and small nib.

I made a recent visit to Nota Bene, Montréal’s glorious and very comprehensive stationery shop. I was on a bit of a mission to find some fountain pen friendly index cards, as well as some more of my stationery staples. I was quite pleased by some of the things I found.

A mini post just to show the beautiful sticker sheets from Artpetry, a Ukrainian artist who has incorporated the traumatic imagery of life in wartime to be creative and bring a little beauty to even the worst of the world.

On my recent Montréal shopping spree, I grabbed a lovely notebook from Lili Graffiti, with an illustrated cover showing an iconic Montréal street scene. It was in a mylar sleeve and I did not try to take it out, seeing the description that it was “lined” paper. Despite being staple-bound, I have been trying to overlook this recently as my new favourite notebooks are Goulet Pens’s staple-bound notebooks with lined 68gsm Tomoe River paper.

Four Bears Sticker Club is another resource for fun adhesives, and in the tradition of Pipsticks and Violet, I have sought to use some of the goodies they offer.

I recently went on a bit of an online shopping spree with Journalsay, which from the evidence I’ve found is a distribution partner for Jianwu stationery. The online shop includes numerous other brands, and specializes in decorative sticker products.

Someone recently recommended Franklin-Christoph to me, indicating they made their products in the US and had unveiled a new line of fountain pen paper made from sugar cane fibre, something I’ve been increasingly aware is a great fountain pen medium. This has been sold under other brands, along with papers made from bamboo, straw fibre and corn husk fibre, all of which boast much better fountain pen qualities than typical wood fibre paper, possibly because they’re annual “green” fibres - types of grasses rather than wood from perennial trees.

I’ve enjoyed buying a LOT of stuff from JetPens lately. They became my first go-to for all the variety they stock, and especially since I started playing more with gel and fountain pens, and since CultPens’s website started giving me weird errors and essentially being unusable on all browsers. But my enthusiasm waned after a couple very long waits for shipments, unexpected costs and slight disappointments with some pen sets.

Cretacolor is an oddball brand. Pencil manufacturing these days requires significant scale to serve the discount market, but Cretacolor essentially does this by simply monopolizing their small national market in Austria. They do have a global reach, with a fairly well-known position in the art supply space, and their web site shares this narrow focus. But their line of pencil products is significantly wider than this would lead us to believe.

Following up on my post about Pipsticks, MarionBCN and Penpaling Paula, this is part of a series on sticker clubs: generally subscription services where a maker of custom or proprietary stickers and stationery art sends out a batch on a recurring basis, keeping me wallowing in an embarrassment of decorative riches like a pig in mud.

I live in a part of the world where a lot of agriculture takes place, but which honestly is not best suited for it, climatically-speaking. On top of that, I live in a specific microclimate that renders growing your own food a particularly difficult endeavour. In my Lanaudière region of Québec, our last threat of frost is often late May or early June, and our first comes by early October, giving us at best 3½ months of a growing season. The fact that we live on the north slope of a hill on sandy and rocky substrate that has been forest for millennia does not ease things.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with ballpoint pens. They’re great for their ability to write fairly consistently on just about any soft surface, so the many plastinated cards and teaching materials I tend to have accept little else. They are also more water-safe and moisture-safe than any other pen, and their viscosity and quick drying make them a must for writing addresses on envelopes that I want to make it to the other side of the planet through all sorts of weather.

Penpaling Paula (likely intended to be pronounced as “pal” rather than “pale” as spelled), is a Spanish-Irish creator who makes some quite lovely stationery on offer both as stand-alone products and as Patreon-based subscription tiers. I recently received my first of her bimountly releases in the mail and it was packed full of useful and original things.

Denise Peter is an artist from Hessen, Germany. Her work is primarily wildflowers and outdoor scenery, both natural and human, in colourful gouaches and contrasting silouettes. I originally saw her art on one of the many flower-focused Instagram feeds I follow, and loved them so much I grabbed a selection of postcards to support my Postcrossing habit.

Pen Chalet is a seller marketing itself primarily at the high end “luxury” side of the pen market - at least that’s what their website seems to imply. A quick look at the site menu doesn’t reveal a menu for “pens,” but rather for “fine pens.” It’s a bit sad because this does not necessarily translate to their selection or prices.

St-Gilles is a papeterie located in Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive, in the Charlevoix region of Québec. They have a very limited product line of decorative and artistic papers made on-site in their small workshop. Many of their papers are made with the petals of local flowers embedded into the grain, and they all are heavy weight and super smooth for artisanal cotton papers.

Marionbcn is the handle of a Swedish artist Raquel, a snail mailer who also creates lots of stationery of her own. She sells her wares both a la carte and with various Patreon subscription packages. The lower tiers are for those who just want the warm feeling of helping out a creator, but the upper tiers are actually some interesting recurring stationery values.

I think I discovered Goulet pens whilst looking for a specific kind of ink. In fact, they are either one of the most SEOed sites for ink searches or they simply have one of the best selections. The first time I placed an order, I stocked up on their ink samplers, and this proved to be exactly what I needed.

A couple weeks ago I showcased Stationery Pal, a mainland Chinese stationer with a wonderful selection and very good prices. Today I look at another of these - this one with a specialization in the bullet journal craze. Obujo, whose name apparently is short for “OMG Bullet Journal!” attracted me mainly because of their fantastic selection of washi stickers contained in cute little booklet form factors.

For a Canadian company, Wonderpens needs to know a little more about their home turf. I ordered a pen and some inks from this Toronto-based stationer recently, and upon its arrival in my non-climate-controlled community mailbox, in January, in Québec, from Toronto, the first thing I noticed was this giant “do not freeze” sticker. It was -30°c at the time.