(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)
Ferris Wheel Press inks have been catching my eye a lot lately and I even bought a bottle at the Chicago Pen Show, despite my resolution to not buy more ink until the stash diminishes a little. It's even more tempting to cave in when the inks come in these adorable 5ml sample bottle sets.
The Fashion District Ink Charger Set is just that--adorable and tempting. It includes three tiny bottles of FWP ink in themed color sets. This one has Bathurst Blue Denim, Spadina Rose, and Queen Allium. The bottles come packaged in a nest inside of a box, but heads-up that mine were leaky. You can see the ink stains on the inside and outside of the cardboard, and two of the bottles were about 1/3 empty. They continued to leak a bit as I worked with them, and now I have a rose-colored ring on my desk mat. The bottles are also very narrow--made to fit a converter, but not a pen nib. So they won't work with any pens that have internal fillers, like piston or vacuum-fill pens.
Inside the adorable-but-kind-of-annoying bottles are three lovely ink colors. The Bathurst Blue Denim is a very nice grey-blue with a fine gold shimmer. The shimmer really comes through, even in finer lines, and the blue tone is just different enough to be more fun than a standard blue. The Spadina Rose is a really lovely dusty pink color, no shimmer, that looks like the perfect shade for a Victorian tea party. It's on the pale side for writing with very fine nibs, but has excellent shading with broader writing. The Queen Allium is a pink-toned purple shade with gold shimmer. It is also a pale, soft color that might be difficult to see in a fine nib, but it is also very rich where the ink shades and pools. The shimmer is slightly less visible in the finer/paler areas, but looks excellent with heavier application.
All three shades are beautiful and go really well together. The set costs $16 at Vanness Pens, which is just over a dollar per ml of ink, which is fairly standard for sample sizes. However, as I mentioned, I lost a few ml to a leak in the bottle's cap seals. In general, I'm a big fan of these inks. I like the softer colors, and I have had no issues with the full-sized FWP ink bottle I own. So while I'm not sure I'd recommend this wee set, I do recommend the inks themselves.
(Vanness Pens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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