Papier Plume Water Gardens
Water Gardens is a limited edition ink released by Papier Plume for the 2024 Dallas Pen Show. Unfortunately the ink is now sold out, but please do check out Papier Plume (https://papierplume.com/). They make most of their inks in-house.
Water Gardens is named after the Fort Worth Water Gardens (I tried to draw the one of the installations at the Water Gardens. … I can’t draw, lol)
I purchased this ink from Papier Plume in September and swatched it right away although I waited to ink a pen until December. It was one of my festive colors for the holidays, the beautiful teal color of the ink with the bronze shimmer reminded me of the garland we used to hang on the tree.
Bonus! The bottle is really nice too because the cap is sealed with wax that is the same color of bronze as the shimmer inside, neat!
I ended up playing around with this ink a ton! I've only used a shimmer ink once before in a pen and that experience was okay. Shimmer inks tend to throw me for a loop because I don't have a whole ton of experience with them. So all December all I talked about was Water Gardens, LOL!
I liked this ink, the base color is beautiful, it's a greenish leaning teal and it's packed with shimmer. I put it in three different pens with different nibs. First I put it in two TWSBI's, one medium and one broad. I didn't get a good fill with either, this was user error. The ink ended up almost leaking out of both pens. Most of it was on blotter paper, but you'll see in a longer writing example, bigger pools of ink that I had to blot and wipe off the nib. Even after trying to get the air out of the barrel, I ended up having issues. Completely on me.
I decided to try a converter filled pen and had much better luck with that. I used my Edison x Atlas Collier LE, making sure to get a full fill with no air. I was a little nervous doing so. Sure enough, that was it! I got beautiful writing from it. No flow issues, no shimmer clogs. Just beautiful shimmery writing.
The chromatography strips shows a mix of yellow and light blue and the swatch is packed with bronze shimmer. The writing samples are all packed with bronze shimmer.
Smaller writing samples on Mnemosyne, Rhodia, Tomoe, Travelers, and Clairefontaine (Some of the scans didn't show the shimmer as well as I had hoped).
Longer writing in the Broad nib is where I had the issues and you can see that with the splotches, again this was due to air in the barrel. The writing however is still beautiful with a healthy amount of shimmer in each letter. The medium nib writing sample was beautiful also with shimmer in every word. I also tried to take close ups of the writing to show off the shimmer.
Dry time was around 30 seconds and the ink had an average flow and puts down shimmer in every word. If the pen is filled correctly, this is a well behaving shimmer ink. Just be aware to get a full fill. This is also a lovely ink to do some art projects with. I quite enjoyed using a glass dip pen and coloring in the Dominant Industry color book.
PS - All ink reviews are my own and have been purchased with my own cash.