Review: Bic Cristal 1.6 mm Pens

For a few years now, pen manufacturers have been making broader pen points than 1.0 mm, which for a long time used to be the most standard nib size (I am guessing) commonly available.  Of these larger sizes that started appearing in the stores, 1.4 mm and 1.6 mm seem to be the most common.  (I don't recall ever seeing a 1.2 mm nib.  Do they exist?  Would they be that much different from 1.0 to be able to tell any difference at all?  Inquiring minds, etc. etc.)  I would look at these pens and think, "Who in the world would want to write with that chunky thing?"  And then I would buy them.  And try them.  And generally not care for them, so the answer to my question would be, "Not me, obviously."

However, hope springs eternal, and I keep buying and trying these types of pens.  I want to like them, but somehow they never seemed quite right.  Until now.

A week or so ago, I bought a pack of Bic Cristal pens in all different colors, and part of the reason these caught my eye was that they were 1.6 mm pens.  (I believe these are called the Bic Cristal "Bold" pens.  I should have saved the packaging, but I didn't expect to be writing this review!)  This was a little bit of a turn-off due to my past experience with this size nib, but I really liked some of the colors in the pack, so I thought they were worth taking a chance.

Here's my verdict after writing with them for several days: I don't know if it's the ink in the pens (just typical Bic ballpoint ink, as far as I can tell -- someone correct me if I'm wrong), or the 1.6 mm nibs, or some magical pen fairy dust they have sprinkled in these pens, but MAN are they SMOOTH.  The pens literally glide across the page, and although they have a tendency to be a little "blobby" as many of these types of pens do, a little blobbiness is never a deal breaker for me.

Stylewise, these are typical Bic Cristal pens, with all the classic design features that we all know and love (OK, that I know and love -- you might hate Bic pens but I for one associate them with my childhood; they were one of my top go-to pens as a kid).  Caps, barrels, stamped logo -- it all screams "Bic!!"

And even the ballpoint looks typical -- except for that seemingly impossibly huge ballpoint.  But I think that is definitely the secret of this pen's success.  The ballpoint comes with a small blob of wax affixed, to keep the pen from drying out before a writer gets to it.  That is not something I associate with Bic pens -- and it's certainly something associated more with gel pens than with regular ballpoint ink -- but I suppose it's necessary for keeping the ink from drying out on such a broad point.

In addition to the smoothness of these pens, the ink itself also seems to be more vibrant and intense than other Bic pens I have tried.  While this certainly could be due to the simple fact that the 1.6 mm tip is laying down more ink pigment on the page, it does make me wonder if this is a new or special formulation of ink.

 

At any rate, these pens are fantastic and I highly recommend them.  And they give me hope for the 1.6 mm nib!

 

Yet Another Envelope Style

This one is a little more finicky because the name has to be centered and the ink of the address has to be black enough to match the intense black of the Sumi Moon Palace ink I use with the pointed pen for the name.  But I think it's fun and striking.

Incoming!

Like a trickle at first...

Then a few more drops...

 

Love this envelope from PostMuse, by the way -- made out of a page from the USPS stamp catalog!

And now a flood!  Boy, is my mailbox happy these days!

Another Envelope Style

I have discovered that one of my favorite things to do is to look for and develop interesting methods of addressing envelopes using my calligraphy skills and pens.  So, here's another one I have been experimenting with and using lately.

If you're one of my penpals, you might see this kind of thing in your mailbox sometime.  If you're not my penpal yet, you know how to fix that!

Making Envelopes: Hello Friend!

I don't know why, but all of a sudden I have this fascination with handmade envelopes.  It could be due to all the wonderful mail I have been getting from LetterMo participants over the past week (I'll show those in another post), or it could just be because this is an easy way for me to be creative -- and I'm always looking for easy and quick ways to be creative.

Either way, I have been experimenting with making envelopes out of scrapbooking paper, which is fun.  But it can also be problematic if the scrapbooking paper is too thick -- it makes folding difficult and it also makes the envelope heavier than it needs to be (although VERY protective!!).  So I have been thinking about making envelopes out of regular printer/copier paper.

I hadn't gotten very far on that idea, however, when I also started experimenting with the Slow Journaling technique as presented on Daisy Yellow's awesome art blog.  I did a page in my journal and was so pleased with the result that I suddenly had a brainstorm to do the same thing with some envelope art -- and came up with this:

There's a blotch at the bottom of the page, but I left it rather than redo the whole thing, because it's unlikely that that part would ever get onto a meaningful part of a finished envelope.

I scanned it not only to have a record of what it looked like before I folded it up into an envelope and mailed it, but because it occurred to me that I might not want to take the time to do this every time I wanted to send out a letter.  (It didn't take forever to do this, and it was certainly a relaxing, semi-mindless activity, but it doesn't jibe with the whole "easy and quick" creativity thing.)  So since this is a scan, and even though the resolution on the image above might not be great, the original is very high resolution, and I can print it out to my heart's content and make this over and over again:

Pretty cool, if I do say so myself!  Slap a label and a stamp on that thing, and you've got instant mail art!  Someone will be seeing this in their mailbox soon, I'd be willing to bet.

Curve Balls and Tornadoes

Here's what I hate about life... curve balls.  I never know how to respond to them.  (I suppose if I did, they wouldn't be curve balls, now would they?)

I was enjoying LetterMo, sending mail out every day, and waiting for letters to come in (which they finally did, many thanks -- and I'll be responding as soon as I can), and then this happens:

That's my church.  In ruins.  Hit directly by a tornado yesterday evening.  The tornado also passed to the north of my house, several miles away from the scene above, but thankfully nothing was damaged although it certainly scared us.

The damage to the church hit us hard, of course, because we have been members there for close to 20 years.  But it hit us especially hard for two other reasons.

A few years ago the church acquired a magnificent pipe organ from another church in town that was moving to a new campus and not taking the organ with them.  It was a scary and expensive thing to acquire and install this organ, but we did it because we felt it was the right thing to do.  And since I am the church organist, I was completely involved in the project, and I have since enjoyed playing the instrument every Sunday.  That's over for now.  The organ is largely salvageable, it appears, so its thousands of pipes will be put in storage for safekeeping and will (hopefully) be reinstalled in an even more beautiful sanctuary one day.

The other reason my heart is tight in my chest right now is this:  the church was to be the site of my daughter's wedding this summer.  We have been planning this wedding for the past year, and she grew up in this church.  It's a totally selfish thing to be upset over something so trivial in the big scheme of things, I suppose, but to see my little girl's hopes for a wedding in our beautiful church be dashed in a moment by a tornado's fury is really hard for this daddy.  (I hope that sentence makes even the remotest amount of sense, because I don't know how to fix it and don't have the heart right now.)

Life will go on, and buildings will be rebuilt, and messes will be cleaned up.  Witness our recovery from Hurricane Katrina years ago, which at the time seemed like the end of the world.  But in the meantime, I think the coming days and weeks will be hard.  There are lots of people all over the city with damaged houses tonight (and the rain is pouring down like crazy), and the damage on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi (right across the highway from my church) was even more horrendous.  I'm ready to get to the part where yesterday and today are unpleasant but distant memories.

LetterMo: Days 6 and 7

One of my favorite styles of addressing an envelope:

It's hard to tell much about it from the blurred out addresses, I just realized, so here's mine in the same style:

 

Quick, easy, and interesting!