Our Own Private JetPens

I've had the products sitting for a long time. I haven't really used them because I honestly wanted to write a review on it. I even still have one of them wrapped up as we speak! It's pretty insane. But here's my third purchase from JetPens. For those who don't know, I'm obsessed with paper goods, and I have probably more pens, notebooks, and journals than is absolutely necessary. And of course, I see no end in sight. JetPens is both great and dangerous because their products are reasonably priced and of excellent quality. Because of that, I've become a frequent customer.

I bought five new items from them on September 25th, and I got them on the 27th, if my folder name is anything to believe. They're pretty fast with their shipping, which is something I love about them. As you can see in the image above, the products came packaged together very nicely in bubble wrap. Which I saved.

And here are the contents outside of their bubble wrap.

「へー？ちょっと！ニルさん、４つのアイテムこれヤ！」

The white box is incredibly plain as you can see. There's nothing specifically special about it. However, inside of it, it has two of the products that you see inside of it. For a moment, I would like to talk about the three paper products that you see before you.

I pretty much have a consistent feeling about JetPens. The paper is very soft and flowy. The paper doesn't stick together; the pages aren't hard to flip, and I have no problem getting any of my pens, especially my super old ones, to write on them. That's something I honestly look for because I have a lot of problem pens.

One thing that I really respect is that the quality doesn't change, within reason. I've roughed up my B6 cover note with my graphite pencils and my beat up, old ass, pink eraser. However, despite that, the pages stayed smooth and manageable. I haven't really done anything special with the notebook and memos, but I have faith that it'll be the same.

Now, moving over to what's inside the box before I make my way back to the others.

« 'The eraser's still in the wrapping!' tu a dit!" »

The pen is the Pentel Sharp Drafting Pencil in 0.5mm with the burgundy body. I always go for colours that I don't typically use when it comes to paper goods if I possibly can. The pen controls as expected of a 0.5mm. I've had some experiences with drafting pencils, and I think they've all been Pentel as well. What I've noticed is that the bodies are very smooth, and there are no distracting parts to them. Where, on a normal 0.5mm pencil, the silver part for the leg would be even with or a little bigger than the pencil's body, this is different. The silver bit is actually tucked under the shell. The finger rest is ribbed, but for some reason, it feels amazing against my calloused finger.

I compared this drafting pencil against my Sanrio [don't ask, please] 0.5mm, and I'm actually surprised by the comparison. It's something that I never really took into account until seeing the difference with my own eyes. The drafting pencil writes thinner and lighter than the Sanrio. I took a moment to look, and the lead nibs between the two are a bit different.

The drafting pencils is, naturally, thinner, and the lead entrance curves in. I believe that shaves down the lead as it exits, so it ends up coming out a lot thinner than it would otherwise. The drafting pencil is the same height as my Sanrio, so in effect, I think that it's a standard height for what it is.

And now onto the eraser. So, yes, the eraser's still in the wrapper—until now, that is. This is the Seed Ruflat Eraser with the orange body. The wrapper is easy to remove, thankfully. It's one of those that you can pull down the bottom most flap and open it. And the eraser just, boom~, slips out. The body of the eraser is incredibly sleek, but the material is something that can be scratched easily. I just have that experience—I hope that I can prevent that from happening with the Ruflat.

There's a button on its side that's supposed to extend out the eraser for replacement. Tell me why I struggled with it at first. It refused to budge, and on top of that, I kept thinking I needed to push it in to get it to work. But no, no, pressing it down from the top works just fine. If you click it out fast enough, you can get the eraser to pop out a bit.

How does it work? Well, it depends on how you use it and also in what direction. I did the vertical left-right, and it erases pretty well. It leaves some trace of the pencil markings beneath. If you do the horizontal left-right, then it works damn well. It almost completely erases its victim. After the vertical maneuver, I did the single swipe to see if it could do any damage. It left some residue behind and sort of trailed over when I was doing the horizontal gesture. It's not very effective at all, and I would probably refrain from doing it again, ahahaha. The circular opening on the eraser is handy because I could out the drafting pen through it and never lose either of them, to be honest.

I'm going to go left to right on this one, so let's start with Little Blue, which is the Kokuyo Tidbit Free Cut Memo Pad, size A7 in baby blue on 5mm graph paper. The first thing to note is that the memo is free cut, which means you can make any shape memo and easily tear it out. This is fantastic for my Tetris obsessed heart. I played around with the pages a bit, and they do retain their fold a bit. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's still wise not to get too fresh. There's a purposeful crease on the front cover, and that reason is because there's a pocket on the inside. I love it. I can store my own little notes in there and just aaaah~ Nice. The front of the pages are very smooth, but the tearaway edges are more revealed on the underside.

The Rhodia Pad No. 10 with lined paper actually surprised me because I never expected it to be that small. The dimensions are 2" x 2.9", but it only surprised me because I thought I bought something larger. It fits dead in the center of the Tidbit just under the pocket crease. The pages are perforated at the top, which makes them easy to remove. Now because it's so freaking tiny, I'm not really sure that I'll ever really use it. So I'm going to give it to my roommate Andy who likes (read: loves) tiny things. I believe this will be to his tastes.

The final notebook is probably my favourite if not for appearances alone. It's the Maruman Mnemosyne Light Notepad in A5 with 40 graphed sheets. Again, the pages are perforated at the top. There's a good inch of space between the top of the sheets and the topmost graph line. In light, light text, there's "Title/No." for all your organizational needs. I'm saving this for a special occasion, and I think that I might have an opportunity very, very soon.

I'm excited, even though I have nothing else to say on it aside from the collective paper statement from before. I believe that I have a great arsenal here with these notebooks, my pens, and what I actually just bought yesterday/Saturday. Very excited for all of that to come in the mail. All in all, I paid $28.70. Of that, $7 came from shipping.

One thing that I have to say is that shipping is not flat rate and varies a bit by weight, I think, and most definitely by destination. They do offer international shipping for those who are worried. However, I would read their shipping information just for some added knowledge. There are other sites that I have wanted to try out for some time, but I'm more than likely always going to be JetPens loyal.

Check out my other reviews from December 2013 and February of this year. If you're interested, go check them out, and remember: tell 'em GDR sent ya!