As many of you may have guessed, I am a huge fan of pink!  The silicon keyboard cover of my laptop is pink, the case is pink, even the case for my iPad is pink.  Lets just say that if I could get everything in pink I probably would ^_^.  So when the opportunity to get the new Pilot Vanishing Point Decimo Sakura Limited Edition in addition to Maruzen’s new Sakuramichi ink I jumped at the chance!

A very inky friend in Japan was nice enough to purchase these items on my behalf and send them across the sea.

My favorite part of the shipment was her awesome letter though, which she wrote in perfect english with a fountain pen of course!

There was a bit of leakage but it created the most wonderful accidental chromatography.

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The pen itself is super cute, and a tad smaller than the Namiki VP Raden that I have.

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The only thing that I wasn’t aware of was that it did not come with a converter nib like the VP Raden does, rather a regular nib with an ink cartridge.  Not to be denied my chance to use this pen on the maiden voyage of my Maruzen Sakuramichi experience, I put the converter nib from my VP Raden into the Sakura Decimo.  I have no idea if you are supposed to do that, but it worked!  Nothing seems to be damaged and the fit is fine.  Now for the ink!

InkJournal Entry:

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Line going down on 68GSM Tomoe:

Ink Blob:

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And while the ink doesn’t have much of a sheen, I thought that the shading deserved a time-lapse.

The ink itself is a lovely color, but didn’t behave as well as Maruzen ink has in the past.  The first thing I noticed was the rather dry flow, next the saturation wasn’t great even for a color that is supposed to be dainty, and finally there is an utter lack of sheen even in the wettest pools.  The ink does redeem itself with its beautiful shading though!  The range of color this ink produces is pretty amazing.

Comparison wise, it reminded me a lot of Mycena Pura and Sankodo, but just with more brown in the mix.  Both of those colors have that wide range of shading, but even if you have both Sakuramichi is definitely different enough to warrant a purchase.

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If they were trying to match the pen with the ink they did a very good job!  The pink tone along with that almost yellow/gold halo in the blob look almost exactly like the pink tone on the pen and the gold hardware/nib.

I leave you now with another teaser photo from my upcoming announcement ^_^

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