Our story — Meet Ujjwal
I grew up in Kathmandu, moved to Brisbane for an engineering degree in 2009, and spent the next decade designing tolerances for structural components at a mid-size firm in Parramatta. The work was precise. I liked that. What I did not like was that every paper product I bought for sketching or writing felt like it had been spec'd by someone who had never actually used it. Pages that buckled under a wet brush, bookmarks that cracked after three weeks, sets where the pen nib was the wrong hardness for the paper weight included in the same box. Small things. But they kept adding up, and I kept noticing.
Before Wattle Whome, I had a side habit of pulling things apart to work out why they failed. I kept a notebook, not for ideas in the vague sense, but for failure logs. Wrong grain direction on a leather offcut I bought at Paddy's Markets. A calligraphy set from a Newtown gift shop where the bamboo pens had been cut at the wrong angle for consistent ink flow. I started sourcing materials myself, running small batches, testing. My kitchen bench in Kiama became a workspace with more jigs and calipers on it than most people would find reasonable for a hobby.
The actual decision came in March 2022. I had spent a Saturday rebuilding a watercolour kit from scratch because I could not find one where the pan colours, the paper weight, and the brush stiffness were chosen to work together rather than just look good in a box. My partner looked at the bench and said, bluntly, that I should either sell these or stop buying more paper. I registered MASTER CLEAN PTY LTD the following Tuesday, ordered 40 kilograms of 150gsm acid-free stock from a mill in South Australia, and built the first proper version of what became Wattle Whome.
We are based in Kiama on the NSW South Coast now. Most of the testing still happens on that same bench. I work with a small team of three people who care about the same details I do. Every product gets a tolerance check before it goes live, the same way a structural component would. If the paper weight is wrong for the pen or the leather grade does not match the use case, it does not ship. That is the whole system.
— Get the spec right first. Everything else follows. — Ujjwal, Ujjwal Raj Dhungel
Journal
Where the leather for our bookmarks actually comes from
Finding a bookmark leather supplier who could talk tolerances with me took almost eight months and a lot of dead ends.
I spent a long time assuming I could just find a tannery online, send a spec sheet, and have something workable arrive in a box. That is not how it went. The first two suppliers I contacted, both based outside Australia, sent samples that stretched unevenly under about 400 grams of lateral force. For a bookmark that gets dragged in and out of a dense sketchbook dozens of times a week, that matters. The bookmark stops lying flat, the corners curl, and eventually the thing looks like it went through a dishwasher. I needed something with tighter fibre density, and I needed to be able to talk to someone who understood what I meant when I said that.
The kangaroo leather we use now comes from a processor in Queensland, working with hides sourced under the national commercial harvest program. I drove up to meet them in August 2023, which felt excessive for a bookmark, but I wanted to see the grading process. The hides they use are graded to a thickness tolerance of plus or minus 0.2 millimetres across the usable area, which is tighter than most of the bovine leather I had sampled. Kangaroo skin has a different fibre structure, more uniform from surface to core, which is why it holds its shape under repeated flexing without needing to be treated to the same degree.
When I got back to Kiama I built a simple test jig out of MDF and some off-cuts from a local timber yard on Terralong Street. The jig holds a bookmark at both ends and applies a repeating 90-degree fold at the midpoint, simulating the way a heavy book closes on it. I ran each sample through 500 cycles before I was happy. The Queensland leather passed. The others did not. I know 500 cycles sounds like overkill for a bookmark, but if you are putting it in a sketchbook you carry around the South Coast on location, it needs to hold up.
The hides arrive here in a small batch every few months, already tanned and finished in a mid-brown that the supplier calls 'natural'. I do not add any additional dye to the main body. The colour you see is the colour it came as, and it will deepen slightly over the first year of use, particularly around the edges where your fingers grip it. I have one I made in the first test run that I have been using myself for about nine months now, and the patina around the top corner is noticeably darker. It is not a flaw. It is just what the material does.
I am not going to pretend the sourcing process was efficient. Eight months of sampling and testing for a product that is 19 centimetres long is a bit ridiculous. But I kept running into the same problem with cheaper or less consistent materials, and I knew I would keep running into it unless I fixed it properly. That is more or less why Wattle Whome exists as a brand at all.
Getting consistent ink flow on recycled paper, a practical guide
Recycled paper and calligraphy nibs are a frustrating combination unless you understand why the ink is behaving the way it is.
I get a lot of questions about the eco-friendly calligraphy set, specifically from people who are trying to use it on recycled or uncoated paper and finding that the ink bleeds or skips. This is not a nib problem and it is not an ink problem. It is a surface tension problem, and once you understand that, you can fix it in about three minutes. Recycled paper has a more open fibre structure than virgin-pulp paper. The fibres are shorter and the surface is more absorbent, which means the ink spreads laterally into the paper faster than the nib can lay it down in a controlled line. The result looks like feathering or ghosting on the reverse side.
The simplest fix is to lightly sand the paper surface before you write. I use 400-grit wet-and-dry sandpaper, dry, and I make about four or five passes in one direction only. This compresses the surface fibres slightly without removing material. You are not trying to make the paper smooth like a coated stock. You are just closing the surface enough to slow down that lateral absorption. After sanding, brush away the dust with a dry cloth or a soft brush. Then wait about 30 seconds before you start writing. The surface needs a moment to settle.
The second adjustment is ink consistency. The set comes with a black walnut ink concentrate, which I source from a small supplier in the Adelaide Hills. At full concentration it is quite thick, and on an open-fibre paper it actually performs worse than when diluted. I mix mine at roughly 3 parts ink to 1 part distilled water for recycled stock. Tap water from most coastal NSW towns including Kiama has enough mineral content to affect the ink chemistry slightly over time, so I keep a 2-litre bottle of distilled water on the desk. This sounds fussy but it costs about $2.50 and lasts months.
Nib angle also matters more on recycled paper than on hot-press or coated surfaces. The set includes a standard oblique holder, and the natural writing angle for most people sits around 45 to 55 degrees. On absorbent paper I bring it up closer to 60 degrees. This reduces the contact area of the nib tip on the downstroke, which means less ink transfers per millimetre of travel, which means less pooling at the start of each stroke. I made a small wooden angle guide years ago when I was still learning, just a wedge cut to 60 degrees, and I still use it when I am demonstrating to people at markets.
None of this is complicated but it is also not obvious if you are coming to calligraphy from a background where you mostly used coated journal paper or smooth cardstock. The set works well on both. Recycled paper just requires you to meet it halfway, and once you do, the slightly rough texture actually adds something to the finished line that you do not get on a slick surface.
Why I built a jig just to bind sketchbooks consistently
The Aussie Outback Sketchbook has 96 pages and a spine that needs to open flat, and getting that right by hand every time is harder than it sounds.
Before I built the jig, I was binding the sketchbooks on a piece of 18-millimetre plywood clamped to my workbench. The result was inconsistent. Some copies opened beautifully flat. Others had a spine that resisted past about 120 degrees, which for a sketchbook you are holding in one hand while drawing with the other is genuinely annoying. The problem was not the binding thread or the adhesive. It was that I was not applying consistent clamping pressure across the full spine length during the drying phase. When the pressure varies, the adhesive sets unevenly, and the spine flexibility varies from copy to copy.
The jig I built is not complicated. It is two pieces of 12-millimetre hardwood ply, 32 centimetres long, connected by four M6 bolts with wing nuts. The book block sits between the two plates with the spine exposed, and the wing nuts let me apply even pressure along the full length. I added a strip of 3-millimetre neoprene to each plate face so the pressure distributes without marking the covers. The whole thing cost maybe $14 in materials from the hardware shop in Gerringong, plus an afternoon of cutting and drilling. I made three of them so I can run multiple copies through the adhesive phase simultaneously.
The other variable I had not controlled properly was temperature. My workshop in Kiama faces south-east and gets cold in winter, sometimes dropping to 11 or 12 degrees overnight in July. PVA adhesive sets more slowly in the cold and can remain slightly flexible when it should be firm, which affects the final spine stiffness. I now run a small panel heater in the workshop during binding days to keep the ambient temperature above 18 degrees. I also extended the clamping time from 2 hours to 4 hours during the cooler months. These are not exciting solutions but they made the reject rate drop from roughly 1 in 8 books to about 1 in 40.
The paper in the sketchbook is a 120 gsm cartridge stock sourced through a paper merchant in Sydney. I specified it because it handles both graphite and light watercolour washes without excessive warping, which matters for someone sketching landscapes around the Shoalhaven or down toward Jervis Bay where people often work with a limited wet palette. Getting the paper spec right took about six rounds of sampling. Getting the binding consistent enough that I was not embarrassed to sell the result took the jig.
I still check every copy before it goes into stock. I open it to the centre spread and press it flat on the bench. If it lies within about 3 millimetres of fully flat without me holding it, it passes. If it does not, I pull it from the batch and use it myself. My personal sketchbook pile is currently 7 copies deep, which tells you how many rounds of testing it took to get here.
Sketching on the coast in July, what actually works
Winter on the Kiama coast is not dramatic cold but it is consistently damp, and that changes how you work outdoors with paper and ink.
July in Kiama does not get the kind of cold that makes national news. The temperature usually sits between 8 and 15 degrees during the day, the wind comes off the water, and everything feels slightly damp even when it has not rained. For someone who draws outside, that combination is more of a problem than actual rain. Rain is obvious and you pack up. Damp air is subtle and you do not notice it until your paper has absorbed enough moisture to start behaving differently, lifting slightly at the edges, taking ink more slowly, smearing pencil lines you thought were dry.
I started keeping a small moisture reading with a cheap hygrometer in my bag after a frustrating morning at Cathedral Rocks last August. The humidity that day was sitting at 84 percent, which I now know is the point where I need to change how I work. Above about 75 percent, I switch from the calligraphy set to graphite only when I am outside. Graphite does not care about humidity the way ink does. I use a 4B for the broad marks and a 2H for anything I want to stay crisp. The 120 gsm cartridge paper in the sketchbook handles the damp reasonably well, better than the lighter stocks I used to use.
The other thing I changed was my position relative to the wind. I used to set up facing the view I wanted to draw, which usually meant facing south-east toward the water. Now I position myself so my back is to the prevailing wind and my drawing surface is in my body's lee. It sounds obvious but it took me a while to stop prioritising the view over the working conditions. I also carry a small piece of 6-millimetre ply, about A4 size, as a backing board. It adds rigidity to the sketchbook and gives my hand something firm to press against when the wind is moving the pages.
The kangaroo leather bookmark handles winter conditions better than I expected. I was worried the repeated moisture exposure would affect the leather, but nine months of coastal use on my personal copy has not caused any obvious degradation. The colour has deepened, particularly around the top edge, and there is a slight suppleness to it now that it did not have when new. I have not applied any conditioner to it. I probably should, and I keep meaning to, but the fact that it has survived without that says something about the material.
Winter on the South Coast is genuinely good for outdoor drawing once you stop fighting the conditions. The light is lower, the shadows are longer, and the landscape around Kiama Downs and out toward Minnamurra looks completely different to how it looks in February. I have about 40 pages of winter drawings from the last two years, and they are some of the ones I come back to most.
Customer reviews
Priya M. — Surry Hills, NSW — 2024-03-14 — 5/5
Exactly what I was after
Ordered the Australian Wildlife Colouring Book as a gift for my sister and it arrived in three days, which was quicker than I expected for standard post. The paper is thick enough that markers don't bleed through, which is a real plus. Packaging was neat and nothing was damaged in transit.
Tom B. — Brunswick, VIC — 2024-05-22 — 4/5
Good kit, minor gripe
The Botanical Watercolour Kit is solid — the pigments are vibrant and the included brushes are better than I expected at this price point. My only complaint is that one of the paint pans had a small crack when it arrived, though the paint itself was fine. Emailed the team and they sorted it out quickly.
Sarah K. — New Farm, QLD — 2024-07-09 — 5/5
Beautiful bookmark
The Kangaroo Leather Bookmark is genuinely lovely — the texture is soft and it already has a nice weight to it. I've been using it daily in a hardcover book and it's held up perfectly after two months. Would buy again as a gift.
Marcus D. — Fremantle, WA — 2024-09-30 — 4/5
Good sketchbook, shipping to WA took a while
The Aussie Outback Sketchbook has great paper — takes graphite and light washes well without buckling. Shipping to Fremantle took eight business days on standard, which is on the longer end but not unexpected given the distance. Would probably pay for express next time.
Jess O. — Fitzroy, VIC — 2024-11-18 — 5/5
Bought two as Christmas gifts
Picked up the Eco-friendly Calligraphy Set for two friends and both were really happy with them. The ink quality is noticeably better than the cheap sets you find in chain stores. The gift wrapping option at checkout was a handy touch — saved me some time.
Anika R. — Hobart, TAS — 2025-01-06 — 5/5
Fast delivery, well packaged
Ordered the Botanical Watercolour Kit on a Monday morning and it was at my door in Hobart by Thursday, which I wasn't expecting. Everything was wrapped securely and nothing rattled around in the box. Really happy with the product itself too — the colour range is generous.
Liam C. — Paddington, QLD — 2025-02-20 — 4/5
Solid sketchbook for the price
The Aussie Outback Sketchbook does what it says. Pages are sturdy, the binding lies flat which matters when you're drawing outdoors, and the cover design is understated without being bland. Took off one star only because I'd hoped the cover was a bit more rigid.
Nina V. — St Kilda, VIC — 2025-04-03 — 5/5
Great find
Stumbled across Wattle Whome looking for a birthday gift and ended up ordering the Australian Wildlife Colouring Book and the calligraphy set together. Both arrived within four days and were exactly as described. The colouring book illustrations are detailed without being frustrating — a good level for adults.
Shipping
All Wattle Whome orders are packed and dispatched from our workshop in Kiama, NSW. Standard orders go out via Australia Post and typically arrive within 3 to 7 business days for metro addresses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. Regional and remote areas, including parts of WA, NT, and rural QLD, should allow up to 10 business days. Express orders are sent via StarTrack and generally arrive within 1 to 3 business days for metro locations and 2 to 4 business days for regional areas. Orders placed before 2pm AEST Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day. Orders placed after that cut-off or on weekends go out the next business day.
Standard shipping is a flat $8.95 and express is $14.95. Orders totalling $80 AUD or more qualify for free standard shipping automatically — no code needed. All prices on our website are inclusive of GST. Your order confirmation email will include a tracking number so you can follow your parcel through the Australia Post or StarTrack network. We recommend using a delivery address where someone is available to receive the parcel, as some items may require a signature on delivery depending on their value.
We take care packing every order. Products are wrapped in recycled kraft paper and placed in a sturdy cardboard box sized to minimise movement in transit. If your order arrives damaged, please photograph the packaging and the item before touching anything and email hello@wattlewhome.com.au within 48 hours of delivery. We'll arrange a replacement or refund promptly. Damage claims submitted after 48 hours may be harder to process with the carrier, so please get in touch as soon as you notice a problem.
Returns
We want you to be happy with what you buy from Wattle Whome. If you change your mind, you can return most items within 30 days of the delivery date, provided they are unused, in their original condition, and returned with all original packaging and components. Return postage for change-of-mind returns is at your cost. To start a return, email hello@wattlewhome.com.au with your order number and the reason for returning. We'll confirm eligibility and send you the return address. Refunds are issued to your original payment method within 5 to 7 business days of us receiving and inspecting the returned item.
Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law apply in full regardless of our store policy. If a product is faulty, not fit for purpose, or doesn't match its description, you're entitled to a remedy — which may be a repair, replacement, or refund depending on the nature of the problem. You don't need to return a faulty item in its original packaging to claim under Australian Consumer Law, and we won't ask you to. Contact us at hello@wattlewhome.com.au with photos of the issue and we'll work out the right solution quickly.
There are some items we can't accept back for change-of-mind reasons. Opened calligraphy inks, watercolour paints, and other consumable art supplies can't be returned once the seal is broken, for hygiene and product integrity reasons. Items that have been used or damaged through normal wear or misuse are also excluded. If you're unsure whether your item qualifies for a return before sending it back, just email us first — we'd rather talk it through than have you pay return postage unnecessarily. We aim to respond to all return enquiries within 2 business days.