Diamine Inkvent 2024: Day 6 — Cranberry
Day 6!
Hello everyone! For day six of Diamine Inkvent, we have Cranberry.
The color/properties:
Diamine Claims that Cranberry is a standard ink, however, it has quite a golden sheen to it. It’s not necessarily as bright and reflective of a sheen as on some other inks, but it’s a strong and prominent part of this ink’s character. The base color is a medium carmine red, and there was minimal shading when writing in cursive — it was mostly a solid color, but in print the shading was strong, and a lot of the pink undertones in this ink began to come out in the non-pooled areas of the letters.
*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.
How did it perform?
Cranberry has a medium-wet flow and is well-lubricated enough for a comfortable and pleasant writing experience. Despite having a sheen, I didn’t run into any hard starts or skips during writing, although leaving it uncapped too long will still have this ink dry out in the nib faster than most other inks. There was also a heavy amount of nib creep that I experienced during my writing sample. As mentioned it didn’t cause any issues for me, and the ink was overall well-behaved, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this led to clogging in some pens.
Cleaning this ink out wasn’t a problem and a single soak and flush was all it took for the color to wash out of the pen without leaving any kind of stains or residue. However, I would still caution against using an ink like this in a demonstrator or lightly colored pen that may be prone to staining.
Ink splat
Ink droplets
My personal thoughts…
Oh hey, Sarah called it, we have a Cranberry ink! And wow, it’s even better than expected. I was already excited when I saw the bottle, but watching this ink slowly build up its golden luster while doing the writing sample was so satisfying, I can’t say enough. It’s festive, beautiful, it’s awesome. This is a definite highlight of this year’s Inkvent, and I can see myself using up the bottle relatively quickly.
Sarah’s thoughts…
Before we started opening the calendar, one of my hopes was that we would finally get a cranberry ink in the set. Cranberries are one of Oregon’s many, many agricultural industries, and they’re a mainstay in several recipes that are traditions for my family during this season. When Julian opened day 6 and showed me the bottle, I was SO excited! And it’s just as lovely and festive as I imagined it could be. It actually reminds me a lot of Sailor Yodaki, a very similar red with a surprisingly strong green/gold sheen. I’m looking forward to a full-size bottle of Cranberry in the future!
Written in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook
More Images/Info:
Tools and materials used in the writing samples:
A TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with 3 nib units including a Fine, Medium, and Broad. All nibs are tuned to perform at the same wetness.
A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad
A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook