Music and letter writing!

As if writing full page letters – on monogrammed paper and with fountain pens – and then sealing the envelope with wax and a personal seal was not nerdy enough, I think I have managed to take it to the next level of nerdiness. Now I have 24 different colors of wax beads, a formal set up to melt the wax (no more of the candle version – you actually heat up the wax beads in a small spoon over a tealight candle) and highlighter pens to accentuate the seal.

It is a sheer irony that to show you all these forms of archaic communication, I have to use the internet and social media platforms like Facebook 🙂

Okay, now I need all of you to call me for dinner or lunch at your place. I need to write a lot of thank you letters to try out all the different colors of wax!

Should have found this out long time back…

Wrote it on the customized pad Nikita and I had made with a dip pen with glass tip!

If you found my fascination for fountain pens to be too quirky, this will make me seem even more weird. The background is the following – I was visiting the Dallas Fountain Pen show with Larry a few weeks back when I ran into a person who was selling wax seals. He taught me how to put a wax seal on an envelope.

Came back home and sent him my personal logo (the one you see in the picture in yellow and blue). It took me years to settle on this logo. Eventually, sitting at the bar of Milton’s Cuisines with Sharmila one Sunday night, I had hit upon this design – it has two “r”s – for my initials.

A week later, I had my first personalized wax seal delivered. Now, not only can I write letters with fountain pens, I can put a wax seal too to complete the totally archaic process of communicating. Now, if only I could find a compliant pigeon… 🙂

(BTW, you can spot a newbie error straightaway: I had not aligned the seal correctly with the direction of the envelope flap!)

Turns out I forgot to put 2 more when I took the picture. In any case, Stefanie, here is the answer to your question:

1. Fountain pens with metal nibs: 90
2. Glass pens with glass nibs: 10
3. Quilt pens with metal nibs: 2

#maximalist 🙂

Used it for the first time to write a letter. This is one of the three that I picked up from the Dallas Fountain Pen Show.
Used brown ink. The ink flowed very well…

Four standard nib fountain pens and three glass nib pens. My total is now around 85 standard nib pens and 8 glass nib pens. The rightmost pen is unique in that it is an “eyedropper” fountain pen. Which means, it does not have an ink filling mechanism (like cartridge or ink piston). Like we used to do in India, you just pour the ink directly into the barrel (main body of the pen).

The show this year was a little more subdued (Covid, I guess) bit still there were thousands of beautiful fountain pens. The array of ink colors available was impressive. Larry was taken aback by the shelf with different color ink pots. And that is just one of the shelves!!