Hope you’ve all had a wonderful New Year holiday :)

I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate and sipped a lot of tea, and now we’re back to busy days at work. While we’re still in the first week of the New Year, I thought I’d share a few of my stationery-related resolutions.

1. JUST. WRITE. IT.

I think one of my greatest struggles in blogging is spending too much time pondering whether a post is worth writing. There’s a lot of content out there, and a lot of material has already been covered… so a lot of ideas end up in blog post purgatory, where I somehow talk myself out of them (“but EVERYONE has reviewed Lamy Dark Lilac already, and it’s not even available anymore…”).

This year, I’ll try to get my posts out the door before that happens!

 

2. Send more mail

I’ve been in a long-distance relationship with my owlfriend for a while now, and at the beginning I would write to him frequently. As we’ve had more opportunities to visit each other, and he’s spent more time at home, my mailing frequency has decreased.

I have quite a stash of envelopes, including a box of colorful ones my friend left when she moved away, so I’m hoping to mail more joy this year. If you’d like to do a letter exchange, please let me know :)

3.  Don’t leave nibs in nib holders

They get rusty. And sad. Just don’t do it :(

 

4. Document the small things

I love scrapbooking, but I only document major events– mostly travels. After reading planner posts by The Gentleman Stationer, The London Parchment, and The Finer Point, I’m inspired to be more mindful about recording the minutiae of my days.

I don’t know how I’ll do this yet– the Hobonichi Techo is a tempting (yet intimidating) choice, but so is a blank sketchbook. I’m sure it will take some experimentation.

 

 

Here’s to an amazing 2017!

When I first came up with the idea for this site, I had ambitions to code it entirely by myself using HTML and CSS. I partially wanted to do it as a learning experience, and also because I wanted to control how the site looked, down to the favicon, link colors, and all. One weekend, I sat myself down and actually did that — I wrote out a pretty basic HTML skeleton and a stylesheet to match. I was quite proud of what I was able to come up with, for a complete noob at least!

These are two screenshots of my original, self-coded site :)

However, in order to have a functioning blog, I realized that I would have to build the site in conjunction with a blogging platform — such as WordPress. After quite some research into WordPress, asking bloggers and friends their opinions, I decided to pull the trigger on the more customizable, self-hosted WordPress.org service. I’m learning on the go, and it’s been fun!

Welcome to Owl Ink! Owl Ink is a work in progress.

Here, you will eventually find my posts about calligraphy, lettering, and graphic design! Thank you for reading :)