When I was at the ISOT, I found a product that seemed like such a good idea it actually won an award. It was also one of the handful of products designed to be used exclusively with fountain pens. It wasn’t until I got a sample home and started playing with it that I realized it wasn’t that necessary.
SUITO Cleaning Paper is manufactured by notebook and paper products manufacturer Kobeha. SCP is pieces of blotting paper cut into small rectangles with scallops cut out at one end and perforations down the middle that allow for easy folding. It was popular enough that it won the Grand Prix Award for Functionality at the ISOT.
A pack of SUITO Cleaning Paper.
The idea is that once you’ve inked a pen, you can easily clean the nib with a piece of SCP.
A piece of Suito Cleaning Paper being dragged across a messy nib. (I didn’t fold it correctly so you can see the scallop.)
You can also wrap the paper around the nib and feed and wipe both at the same time. Although you still might get some ink on your fingers, you don’t have to worry about bits of tissue paper or paper towel getting stuck in your nib. You also don’t have to worry about catching stuff on a microfiber cloth. I found that one piece would thoroughly clean a nib with little mess on my fingers.
A piece if SUITO cleaning paper after cleaning a nib. (Note: not the same one as the picture above.)
The best part about the paper is that is allows you to easily clean small, thin areas such as the threads on my Nexus fountain pens.
The problem is that I can easily make this at home with a strip of blotter paper and a pair of scissors.
A piece of SUITO cleaning paper on a strip of blotter paper.
Although the scallop is useful, it isn’t really necessary and I have the same results cutting a piece of blotter paper off of a larger strip and just curling it around the nib.
That said, using blotter paper only works for me because I’m enough of a fountain pen geek that I own a rocking ink blotter (similar to this one) and have a couple packs of blotter paper for it. At $4.07 a pack for 30 pieces SUITO Cleaning Paper is cheap enough that it’s not worth getting a blotter if you don’t already have one.
That’s probably what the people at Kobeha were thinking.