Supply Love: Atyou Spica Glitter Pens by Too

So, as you already know, I have a thing for pens.  When browsing around various scrapbooking and papercrafting suppliers, I saw all kinds of gel pens.  I'm not a huge fan of gel pens - they smear too easily for my liking, especially on coated surfaces, and I'm often just not patient enough to let them dry.   Next thing you know, I've got ink all over my fingers, the item, and my work table, and I feel like that messy 2nd grader who just couldn't get the hang of the cursive 'r'. 

And then I saw two sets of glitter gel pens, made by Too, the same Japanese company that makes the very popular Copic markers. (More on the Copic markers later, because my Xmas present to myself was a set of those.)




I am a sucker for a nicely packaged multicolor pen set, and if you tell me they're from Japan I'm even more interested. My dad used to travel regularly to Japan on business when I was a kid, and he would always bring back intriguing gifts of pens, chiyogami paper-covered pencils and shiny origami paper.

I waffled for a while. These are not inexpensive pens, at around $25 per set. And did I really need 24 glitter pens? What was I going to use them for? In the end, my pen and sparkle craving won, and I bought the brighter Set A. I found another site where I could buy individual pens, and bought the clear pen, which isn't included in either set, apparently, and the handful of pens I wanted from the pastel-heavy Set B.

And man, these are amazing pens. They dry really fast. The glitter is very fine glass, so it's really sparkly in the right light. It doesn't look like the usual sparkly pens you associate with tween girls. Writing with them is really, really smooth and satisfying. They really do "twinkle like stars" as the cute packaging says.

I've found it best to store them on their side rather than upright - when I first wrote with them after storing them in my nifty IKEA hanging buckets, they seemed sort of dry and scratchy. Turned out that was user error and the pens clearly have instructions to store them on their sides. When I do more rubber stamping, I think they'll be great for coloring in small details and adding a bit of sparkle.

I love using them to write my Thank You notes to my Etsy customers, and to address envelopes. Since they dry so quickly, I'm no longer sending out smeary messes. I also use them to write 'handmade by anandi' on the backs of my cards. The sparkle makes my computer-degraded handwriting look a little nicer :)

Do you have these pens? What do you think?