Fountain Pen Ink Reviews #1 & 2: Troublemaker Autumn Rain Gray & Purple Yam

When I first started writing reviews and this blog, I thought I’d put in both of my two hobbies into it: whisky and fountain pens. So far, it’s basically been one and not the other. Guess it’s time to change that a bit!

Yesterday, after around a month of waiting, I finally got in a pair of Troublemaker Inks so I thought I would share some thoughts I had on them.

The inks are Troublemaker’s Autumn Rain Gray and Purple Yam. Both were ordered at TMK’s standard wetness of, well, wet.

Taking a look at the swab of the Autumn Rain Gray, it’s a gorgeous forest green color with a bit of grey mixed into it. I’m not sure why exactly they would name this the way they did but it’s a beautiful color nonetheless. Unfortunately, I’ve got one too many pens inked up with green at the moment so I don’t have a writing sample of this yet. It will be the next one in my rotation though.

The Purple Yam is a really interesting one. When I first made a swab of it, I was blown away because it looked exactly like Japanese purple yam. And then, as it was drying, it turned into a bit more of a blue before ending up as you see in the picture. A quick writing sample of it using a Platinum 3776 “F” again kind of shows it more of a blue than the purple. It is with a Japanese fine tipped pen, perhaps I should be throwing this into something with a bigger nib to get the true purple color out of it. I’ll also note that even though this is a “wet” ink, it dries pretty much instantaneously.

Overall though, these are two beautiful colors at really reasonable prices. I’m a sucker for purples and greens so these are right up my alley. I’m curious what their drier options are like so I might try one of those next.

A couple of notes on the packaging. When this showed up, I had a bit of a chuckle at the sheer number of stamps on the packaging (24, by my count). But hey, it got the job done and I can’t complain at all about free shipping to the US. I can’t say I’ve ever seen Filipino stamps either so I took a few close ups in case anyone was interested. P28, P5, P1. There was this on the back I nearly missed as well.

The ink bottles came neatly wrapped in paper and looked like little gifts. They had a plastic wrapunderneath the caps which I imagine was to prevent spilling. Definitely appears to have done the job since they came in one piece with nothing spilling out.