I sent some snaily thank-yous out yesterday evening. I busted out my nib and ink for the first time in almost 2 years and not only addressed the envelopes with it but wrote both notes with it too! I'm pretty pumped about that. My ink-cup was all dried up, so I had to clean it out and refill it with lovely, silky new ink. My bathroom sink looked like a squid threw a major tantrum in there and inked all over the place!
I recently ordered several new nibs and a new nib-holder and they arrived yesterday. I'm excited to start playing with them later this week. I’m using them as my reward for finishing up one more pencil drawing (which I haven’t started yet. I’m in major procrastination mode). But my old nib and pen weren’t part of that deal, so I could play with them all through the evening without any internal conflict. (Heh, heh. :-D)
It felt great to be nibbling again. So I'm sending more snails out this evening by the light of my desk-lamp. Even though it's only my second evening back with the nib, I felt so much more at ease with it. It’s coming back slow and steady! I haven't used my mushroom stamp in a while and was perplexed to find that it and my original snail stamp have aged weirdly (they’re all speckled in the recesses where they shouldn’t even have ink!). So that’s concerning, but fine, because they still stamp no problem. It’s just part of the learning process as I get more into handcarved stamps and work to understand what they need to be happy.
These envelopes feature a couple of our latest snail stamps! As per our usual routine, Benjamin carved them for me from my drawings.