There's less than a week left to support St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital during the month of September! The 12 hour Relay "Podcastathon" stream from a studio at St. Jude was this past Friday and among all the games and silliness there are always incredible videos and interviews with people connected to St. Jude, from doctors and researchers to parents and patients. Every year I learn even more about how St. Jude keeps pushing forward, inspired by the dream of founder Danny Thomas that "no child should die in the dawn of life"—at no charge to patient families, sharing their research freely, and working with other institutions to improve survival rates around the globe.
Three special Twitch stream topics have been unlocked by donations to my sub-campaign so far! Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the current total of $161 raised. Here's a brief recap of each of the special topic streams (stream videos are available to watch on Twitch) and what's ahead for the rest of this campaign.
Unlocked at $50 Using Shimmer Additives
I've recently picked up several more Pennonia shimmer additive colors so I was excited to "swatch" them all and start making custom shimmer inks. I mostly stuck with Pennonia inks to minimize the chances of unexpected reactions between the ink and the shimmer additive.
The Bézs (Beige) shimmer is by far the shiniest, in Pennonia Borahe (from Inkdependence) it took on a lavender shade but remained very bright. In contrast, the Fehér Szatén (Satin White) shimmer had a softer, powdery look like confectioner's sugar on a chocolate dessert when mixed into Gesztenyebarna (chestnut brown). I mixed a combination of colors in bright green for a Halloween monster theme, and also into a bright pink. The final combo was trying the Pennonia shimmer in Pilot Iroshizuko Ku-Jaku, which has been working well in a titanium flex nib that needs a lot of ink flow!
Unlocked at $100 Ink Painting Collage
This is an idea inspired by some quilted animal patterns I made almost 10 years ago using batik fabrics. I could make interesting inky colors and patterns on paper, a bit like those colorful batiks, to assemble in a collage to make a design or pattern like the quilt. The first piece I did for the quilt was this owl, so my first test was recreating that in ink and paper.
This is a good way to make use of the dregs of old ink samples, "mystery" unlabeled samples, large ink bottles you'll never use all of, extra fountain-pen friendly paper from unused notebooks etc. On the stream I spread a bunch of ink colors on sheets of Tomoe River paper and let them dry. Then I picked a couple simple subject ideas to build by cutting out shapes and gluing them to a thicker piece of paper (cardstock) until I had a peaceful tree and a cheery Jack-o-lantern.
I intend to continue experimenting with this for custom notebook covers, notecards, bookmarks, wall art, etc., perhaps using a laminator to secure all the layers in some scenarios.
Unlocked at $150 CMYK Ink Mixing
Generally speaking I think it's fairly safe to mix inks within the same line and brand, though mixing in a sample vial and waiting to see if any unwanted reactions occur is always best. For this stream I started with two sets that were intended to be mixed, mixing drops of color on paper to demonstrate the range of color that can be achieved with the "CMYK" colors of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
The first set was Birmingham Pen Co inks Ice Age, Amaryllis, Naples, and Chimney Soot from the "Everlasting" water-resistant line. By putting drops of ink around a circle in roughly 1:0, 2:1, 1:1, 2:1, 0:1 concentrations between magenta, cyan, and yellow you can see a rainbow of shades. Adding in black gives darker and more muted shades like petrol, olive, taupe, and mauve.
The second set was the Kuretake Ink Cafe set meant to be used with their refillable brush and fiber tip pens, or dip pens. These colors are not quite the "CMYK" shades but fall pretty close with blue, pink, yellow, gray, and also "transparent" that will dilute the color. Here I mixed a soft gray-green ink in a small inkwell and then filled an empty fiber tip pen with the custom shade.
The last test was to explore an idea I'd heard, that the three Pennonia inks from Amarillo Stationery were close enough to cyan (Azul Frida), magenta (Rosa Mexicano), and yellow (Amarillo Antiguo) that they would mix well for a variety of colors. These did in fact mix well to create a range of vibrant shades, and as standard inks that would be compatible with the Pennonia shimmer additives I am interested in exploring these more.
Why St. Jude?
I can only imagine how heartbreaking and terrifying a cancer or life-threatening illness diagnosis for a child is for a family, or how hard it is to treat and care for sick kids who won't all make it to adulthood, or how many failures in research happen before there is a breakthrough—but you can see the hope St. Jude brings by striving to create the optimal environments for patients to receive the best treatments, families to get the support they need beyond just medical treatments, and researchers and doctors to advance the success rate of treatment. You can learn more about supporting St. Jude here.
I want to see more of what St. Jude Children's Research Hospital brings to the world and that's why I'm spending many hours this month inviting people to join me in supporting St. Jude via extra streams on Twitch, making custom ink swatches, and sending handmade thank you cards. My goal of raising $250 that I'll match for a total of $500 seems like a small drop in the bucket of the over $864,000 dollars raised in the entire Relay campaign so far this year, which is a small fraction of the annual operating budget of St. Jude, but it's all these small drops joining together that make it happen. Every dollar counts!
What's Next?
At $200 raised I'll schedule at least one Lego-building stream, and at $250 I'll make a matching donation of $250 to meet my goal. If that goal is met while there is still time left in the campaign I'll try to squeeze in some more stretch goals! There are over 100 other sub-campaigns as well, including a few other members of the pen community. I do highly recommend completing donations to any Relay-related campaign by Sunday, September 29th (and don't forget to email your donation receipts in time) to be eligible for the Pen Addict for St. Jude Giveaway!
Huge thanks to everyone who has followed, hung out with me on stream, watched the VODs later, etc. on Twitch!
