ink – Page 2 – Deborah Makarios

April 21, 2017

10 Reasons Why Cuttlefish are Amazing

Number 1: their ink is actually ink. Sepia, in fact. Yep, all those drawings by Leonardo da Vinci started life in a cuttlefish ink sac.
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Number 2: They have greeny-blue blood. This is because where we have iron in our blood, creating that lovely rust colour, they have copper, creating that lovely old-copper-roof colour.

Number 3: They have three hearts (eat your paltry two hearts out, Doctor). This is because green blood isn’t as efficient with the whole oxygen-moving thing as red blood is.

Number 4: They have pupils like inverted monobrows. I mean, look at this:
Number 5: On the subject of eyes, they apparently get their eyes all up and running before they hatch from their eggs. So if you happen to swim past a batch of cuttlefish eggs, beware – they’re watching you. And it has been suggested that they gravitate toward the sort of food they saw pre-hatch. (Death by oodles of baby cuttlefish: cutest creepy death ever.)

Number 6: Continuing on the subject of eyes, the cuttlefish has no blind spot. So don’t think you can escape…

Number 7: They are masters (and mistresses) of disguise. They can change colour like sea-chameleons (despite being unable to see colour); they can change their skin texture to more closely resemble their background. And they can do all this accurately, even in near total darkness. How, no one knows. They can even present different appearances on different sides of their body.

Camouflage — See the seafloor, cuddle the seafloor, be the seafloor…

Number 8: One of their colour patterns, used by males when in an aggro situation, is called “Intense Zebra”. (Out of such little joys is a life made…) Not to mention that there’s a species of cuttlefish called the “Flamboyant Cuttlefish”. And here’s why:
Number 9: They have an internal shell, called the cuttlebone, which they use for going up and down like a submarine. More liquid in the shell: down. Less liquid: up. The cuttlebone has also been used for centuries by metalworkers for making moulds for little fiddly things; and more recently by owners of caged birds for keeping up their calcium intake. (The birds’ calcium intake, that is. Not their owners. As far as I know.)

Number 10: They can be terribly grand and impressive:

or completely gosh-darnit cute:
Amazing critters, aren’t they? Which is why I decided to knit a cuttlefish cover for my cellphone. It’s not entirely like a cuttlefish, but it has points of resemblance. I started out intending to use this pattern but in the end it was more ‘inspired by’ than actually ‘based on’.

cuttlefishcosy

Fits smartphone measuring 63 x 120 x 10mm. Howdunnit available on request.

November 25, 2016October 20, 2017

A Working Wardrobe of Writing Tools

Today I thought I would indulge my stationery-geek side (and, hopefully, yours) by introducing you to my writing instruments. (No, I haven’t given them names. Yet.) Illustrated mostly with other people’s pictures, because mine aren’t much to look at.

full-collection — Yep, that’s about as good as my photos got. Sorry. Blame the gloomy weather.

First in seniority is the green Faber-Castell (with goldish accents) which I found, fully functional, in a box of disused fountain pens which was passed on to me by my husband’s family when they found I was interested in such things. (Now that’s the kind of family you want to marry into.) It was this pen that inspired my love for piston-filling fountain pens, and I used it to write the epically large first draft of my WIP. These days it contains Diamine Woodland Green and I use it mostly for writing in my spiritual diary.

From the same box of fountain pen goodness came the Platignum Shorthand Pen – black with silver accents. It uses a rubber sac with a squeezy bar to fill, with the downside of not being able to tell how much ink is left in it. Despite that drawback, it is rapidly becoming my go-to pen for general writing – shopping lists, to-do lists, notes – because it has such a fine line and isn’t too wet, so works well on general-purpose paper. It currently contains Waterman’s Havana Brown (now called Absolute Brown for Absolutely no reason that I am aware of.)

twsbi-bottle
The next to enter my life was my first ever new pen: the TWSBI Mini, which I bought to reward myself for slogging through all 158,840(ish) words of the first draft. It’s another piston-filler; in fact, if you have a TWSBI ink bottle – which I do – the pen’s barrel can refill straight from the socket in the top of the bottle lid, without any of the messiness inherent in dipping a nib into the bottle.
Unlike all my other pens, it also has a clear barrel, so you can see how much ink is left at all times. This also makes it an ideal pen for using with coloured inks. Currently it contains Diamine Majestic Purple, thematic colour of ye olde WIP, and is used for notes and records thereon and thereof.

The fourth of my pens, a gift from my parents last Christmas, is undoubtedly the most aesthetically impressive to behold. (You can’t just look at this one. You have to behold it.) Almost baroque in its ornateness, it features a barrel of Papua New Guinean rosewood, and so much metal ornamentation I got pulled out of line and had my bag searched when going through airport security with it. It’s quite a heavy pen, so I don’t use it for long pieces of writing. It is best for using a) when one feels like being impressive and b) when one wishes to draw a satisfyingly final line through items on to-do lists.

It’s rather a wet nib (so it doesn’t care for everyday paper) and has a smallish (piston-filling) ink chamber, considering the overall size of the pen. It is also filled with my general use brown ink.

Finally, and most recently arrived in my collection of writing implements, there is a pencil. A reusable (i.e. mechanical) one, naturally, for the sake of the environment if not my laissez-faire attitude to getting up to sharpen things. It’s a Pilot Birdie, slim and silver and, well, small. It uses 0.5mm leads and is itself only 5mm thick. It’s designed for use as a notebook pencil, but hey – I’ve got small hands, and it sticks out far enough behind my hand to be comfortable to use. I got mine second-hand, so there’s not much eraser left, but that’s all right. I mostly wanted a pencil instead of a pen for my morning pages (which I’m thinking of shifting to nighttime) so that if I fall asleep mid-page I don’t wake up bathed in Havana Brown.

After all – they call them fountain pens for a reason.

October 28, 2016October 20, 2017

Am I Cruella de Vil?

Not a question one often finds oneself asking. But when it first popped into my mind, I decided there was a case to answer, and promptly borrowed the book from the library to further investigate. The results were not as reassuring as I might have wished.

Cruella wears fur. So do I. [Disclaimer: I don’t buy ‘new’ furs unless they’re from a humanely culled pest species; and I would never knowingly buy or wear the fur of an endangered animal.]

Cruella likes pepper. So do I.

I like ink, too, though I prefer to write with mine, not drink it.

Cruella is married – so am I.
She has no children – neither do I.
Her husband changed his name when they married – so did mine!

Cruella owns a cat. So do I (two, in fact).
Cruella feels the cold. So do I.

In fact, I am feeling distinctly chilly as I look at this list. It’s not looking good!

On the other hand, I didn’t marry a furrier – though back in my high school days a personality test suggested I was suited to being a graphologist or fur designer. (I didn’t know what the former meant, and the latter seemed a bit redundant: they just grow.)

Speaking of school days, while I have been a student at a fair number of schools in my time, I have never once been expelled – as far as I can remember, anyway. Nor do I dominate my husband and force him to eat oddly coloured food smothered in pepper.

I don’t customarily wear slinky satin dresses with ropes of jewels – probably because, unlike Cruella, I am not a fabulously rich society heiress from a notorious family. Well, I’m not a fabulously rich society heiress, anyway (cough). Nor do I own a flashy chauffeured car which “looks like a moving Zebra Crossing” – in fact, I don’t own a car at all; I never have.

HMS Kildangan IWM Q 043387 — If Cruella de Vil owned a yacht…

My hair isn’t black and white either; it is a very dark brown with occasional silver hairs if I hunt carefully. Nor have I chosen to decorate my home in red and green marble (how revolting). Possibly the marbled interior of her home, when considered in the dim and rainy light of the English climate, goes a long way towards explaining why Cruella feels the cold so much…

Cruella’s cat is Persian, kept only because it’s valuable – she drowns all its kittens. My cats (“the Cat” and “the Kitten”), aren’t worth anything. Unless perhaps they get hit by a car and found by Claire Third (warning, cat lovers may find article/images distressing). Of the four kittens the Cat produced in her youth, three were re-homed and we kept the fourth. Most days the Cat seems to think drowning him would have been preferable, but that’s another story.

And for the record, I don’t want to make a coat out of Dalmatian puppies, not even “for spring wear, over a black suit.” I like puppy skins best when containing puppies.

So what do you think? Am I Cruella de Vil, or amn’t I?