# 2 Home: Colorverse Nebula A5 Guide Sheets

Sometimes the clouds cover the sky so uniformly that it looks like if a soft, grey blanket is smothering the entire world. Not a faint ray of sunlight gets through, and you simply live under this dull light. It is the weakest, coldest lightbulb, not even enough to power the grass that lays brown on the muddy soil.

I’m taking the must fun courses I’ve ever taken during my university career, and they all have one thing in common: they lean heavily on theory. Do you know what’s the biggest upside of theory classes? Writing. Lots, and lots of writing. For a person with drawers full of ink and shelves full of notebooks, it doesn’t get much better than that. One day, I’m afraid that someone’s going to ask me why I love learning so much, and I’ll have to answer truthfully, “Because I get to use all of my favourite stationery!”

During these courses, I’m also given some extra lectures and talks to watch, and I watch them with a notebook by my side so that I could take notes. The latest one was a talk between Pallasmaa and Zumthor, two giants of architecture, and one of their first points was Zumthor asking Pallasmaa what home means to him. Pallasmaa has this very deliberate way of talking, and he starts explaining that especially for people who travel often, home is these items that you carry with yourself. Things you lay out first on your bed once you check into a hotel room. These little bits and pieces of who you are, what you care about, always carrying your house with you like a turtle. For me, these are usually my notebook(s), a pencase, a bag of toiletries. And in those notebooks, there are usually guide sheets. These Colourverse Nebula ones to be exact.

This was one of the purchases I had made to get free shipping, thinking that these probably won’t get much use. I try to buy my notebooks lined or grid anyway, why would I ever need guide sheets?

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The working principle of these are very simple: they let you write straight without needing any lines printed on the page. That was a bit of a gamechanger for me, because it made me realize that a lot of notebooks I wanted to try were actually blank. This also includes the Clairefontaine notebooks I buy in bulk to use as scratch paper. These guide sheets gave me the flexibility of using one notebook for whatever I wanted: writing, drawing, ink swatching… Everything simply in one place.

This set of guide sheets were especially a game changer for writing letters. I like using blank notepads to write the letters on, and if you’re lucky, you’re only limited to the squared or lined guide that comes with those. Mostly, they don’t come with any guide sheet. The best part is that some of these are not only grids, but you can use them to swatch inks. It’s great when sending samples to friends so that you write which ink looks like what, make a tidy little swatch sheet.

It just makes my inner perfectionist happy.

I mostly use two blank notebooks at a time: one for just writing everything and anything, another for journalling, because Galen Leather’s 400-page A5 notebooks come in blank. The latter did come with its guide sheet, and I still put a Nebula one in it because you simply cannot get 6 mm lines that shows off my handwriting perfectly otherwise. It’s a delicate balance between cramming as many lines on the page and still having some breathing room so that the ink looks pretty on the page. This kind of customisability is one of the reasons why I love fountain pens so much, and you can take it even further in the paper dimension.

So, home is where my stack of guide sheets is, tucked away in the second drawer of my desk. They sit next to other letter writing equipment like wax seals, safely tucked away from accidents, close enough to be ready when I want to write. No place would feel like home without a guide sheet with me, because how would I journal then? Writing in wonky, mismatched lines? That would simply not do.