6 Pieces Handmade Glass Dip, Crystal Glass Signature Calligraphy Vintage Dip Ink Pen Borosilicate Present Pen for Writing Drawing Decoration (Bright Color)

Do not try to use these as a dab tool. It worked one time for me perfectly fine and the second time I tried to use it. It started to shatter a little by little when they got too hot and small fragments of grass started fling everywhere and one hit me on the cheek. I got very lucky that it didn’t hit my eye. Lesson learned, these are not dab tools.

great product

They are beautiful, (partly why I chose them).I have complaints similar to previous reviews. Some have a rough spot on the tip. One arrived broken. Sometimes the ink flows better than other times. It requires repositioning the pen and/or re-dipping quickly at times. They are fun, however, I’m planning on ordering the conventional metal ones soon, to learn calligraphy better.

The media could not be loaded. This is my first time using glass dip pens. I got them mainly to test out new fountain pen inks and for this purpose they work great! The longer tipped ones hold a decent amount of ink and had a little bit better flow control than the shorter tipped ones, but it might be user error. I think they would work better for writing than the shorter ones.For reference a long tipped one was used on the black paper and each color tested was dipped in ink only once. I could write out two lines, color some of the butterfly, and still had extra ink I needed to wash off before testing another color. A short tipped one was used on the white paper, and I used multiple dips on most, but the paper quality maybe a factor in flow. Only one or two felt scratchy writing on the page, and I've read that can be an issue with more expensive ones too. That can be fixed by careful sanding with a very fine grit sandpaper. All in all, these are quite beautiful, sturdy pens and a great value at $11.99 for six. Even if only one or two wrote well it'd be a bargain in my opinion.*All the inks tested were from Ferris Wheel Press.

The media could not be loaded. Love it. I always wanted one of these and the tip is not like a gold nib and smooth but it is so much fun to use.

The pens arrived well packed with no chips, cracks or breaks. The pens were laid on bubble wrap about an inch apart and then the bubble wrap was circled around the pens several times. Then wrapped again from top to bottom. I tried one and it wrote as well as my hand could guide it to write (I do okay but am no professional) I did a sketch and then drew some very elaborate patterns and it was remarkably smooth and easy to use. Much smoother than any fountain pen and all but a few ball point pens that I have owned. I was very surprised by how long the ink lasted with each tip in the inkwell. Initially it lasted a sentence and after a few times of dipping it and learning how much ink it could hold, it lasted a long paragraph. It also held enough ink to sketch one of the patterns in a 4in square, including all of the elaborate details. I found sketching with it easier and smoother than with regular pens, pencils or markers. I don’t know that I will want to go back to the old stuff after using this. But with 6 pens, maybe I won’t . The key will be finding a holder or something that will keep it mounted to my sketchbook. I plan to try to put it into one of my Apple Pencil holders, but I don’t know that it will fit. I have my doubts. If it does not fit, I may create one.I am very pleased with the pens! I bought them out of curiosity, not expecting to like them this much. I have not tried the pens with the ridges going straight up and down. None of the pens had little glass barbs as one occasionally sees with blown or molded glass, that makes it hard to write smoothly. I expected one or two but I am guessing that either someone checked for and sanded down any that were created in making them or the person who made them have developed the glass skills of an artist.

I have been aware of glass dip fountain pens for some time but was never really interested before. I'm currently comparing a number of inks and I need to consistently write small passages of text with the same pen on the same paper, changing only the ink. I've been using a Pilot Metropolitan as a dip pen but cleaning and drying the nib unit between inks is not a quick process. So I'm looking for something a little more streamlined.What I was looking for was a pen that wrote smoothly and could hold enough ink to write at least four lines across a sheet of 5mm dot grid A4. I evaluated each dip pen by writing out the same text with the same ink and paper until I could write no more. I conducted my writing tests with Diamine Marine ink on Clairefontaine 100 gsm Vellum paper. This exercise was educational in a number of ways.First I had to become familiar with writing with a glass dip pen. I had read about what to expect but I still needed to experience the process to understand it. Even after rubbing the nib on the side of the inkwell to drain away excess ink, I had a lot of ink on the very tip that produced a very wet, wide flow for the first dozen or so letters. Then the stroke calmed down and I started to drain the ink out of the flute closest to the tip and paper. When that was used up, I had to rotate the pen in my hand to find more ink. Writing with the pen entails periodic rotation and accessing more ink until it's all used up. Then you dip the pen again and start the process all over. After writing with modern fountain pens, this is a tedious way to write. There had better be a compelling reason to continue writing with this pen.There is. Cleanup is almost trivial. I kept a juice glass of water and a saucered wet paper towel on my writing desk. To clean the nib, I stick it in the water and swirl it three or four times clockwise and then three or four time anticlockwise. I then wipe it off on the wet paper towel and it's clean. This is considerably easier than cleaning out a modern fountain pen nib unit.Now, on to the pens. Unless you look closely at the product image, you probably won't see that two of the pens have teardrop shaped nibs with straight flutes and the other four have cylindrical nibs with helical flutes. The cylindrical nibbed pens will hold more ink and so will write longer. But each pen has its own carrying capacity; even with the same type of nib, some wrote longer than others. All of the pens were more difficult to start than a modern fountain pen. But once started, most wrote with few problems like dropouts until they begin to run low on the accessible ink. I did have one pen that was so balky that I terminated its trial early. There was also a wide range of nib smoothness among the pens. Some were quite smooth; others, not so much. The balky pen was also the roughest writing, feeling like it was catching on the paper. Smoothing these nibs will not be like smoothing a flat metal fountain pen nib. These nib tips are conical with a blunted apex. If you accidentally flatten the nib, it won't write consistently as you rotate it.All the pens produced a stroke with virtually no variation in stroke width. The writing looked as good as that made by a modern fountain pen using a standard nib. There was no italic or flex effect. There were some minor differences in width of the strokes produced by the pens. Some pen's strokes looked to be as narrow as a European Fine or a Japanese Medium Fine. Others looked more like a European Medium width.I will definitely use these pens for short writing samples of various inks, but I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons to use them for any other type of writing. I'm glad this item contains six pens so I can find the one or two that most closely match the writing characteristics of the pen I'm looking for.

I'm so happy with these pens. They fit very well in my hand and flow perfectly while writing.