I mentioned, when sharing my ink collection, that I had 58 pens and this will be a tour, of sorts, of all 58. It's an eclectic array of pens; from a cheap Noodler's Creeper to the now rather pricy OMAS Paragon Brown Arco Celluloid, my pens are hardly unified. I haven't really got a focus with the collection (though I haven't had, in the past, much of a focus with inks either!). I am, however, keeping an eye out for Sailor Store Exclusive or LE pens that catch my eye but in general I'm merely acquiring pens that I like a certain feature of (such as a nib or material) or a set of features. The closest I am to any form of organised collection is to complete my Visconti Wall Street set (I just need Blue) and I am, more generally, a fan of stacked celluloid.
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637 Bottles and 33.47 litres of Ink
It took a while but I finally cleaned the space around my ink shelf and and arranged the bottles somewhat to take a photo of the entire collection. The title is a bit untrue because as of these photos, 619 bottles of ink were on the shelf (well, one I forgot was on my desk) but I have 18 bottles of ink that are on the way as well making for a total of 637 bottles (593 if you discount the 44 duplicated). That's around 33.47 litres (8.84 gallons) of ink. I have an additional 99 samples and swatches of 165 inks that I have neither bottles nor samples of. In total I have 858 swatches of unique inks.
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Colour Palette No. 1
I received some new (to me) inks for Robert Oster recently. Some have been around for a few months now and some are relatively new and I felt that six of them made for a pretty nice palette of colours. They were all somewhat pastel-like and soft. From left to right there is Vitstyle Red Bear (an exclusive ink to Hong Kong based store Vitstyle), Tangerine, Hippo Purple (an ink made for squishy ink's Kickstarter for her Hippo Noto notebook), Plumb Nut, Australian Opal Mauve, and Cherry Blossom. I hope to do more palette's later down the road.
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Sailor Pens and Inks Facebook Group
Sailor inks have been my favourite inks for a while now. They frequently satisfy the characteristics of inks that I appreciate but are also very collectable. They have limited edition pens and inks as well as difficult to acquire Store Exclusive inks. This makes hunting down and collecting their inks fun (and pricy) but much of the information on the inks is non-existent or very limited, difficult to search for or not in English (which is understandable). I have created a Facebook Group to help fill this gap.
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Ink Review: Robert Oster Signature Ink River of Fire
in Ink Review
While Robert Oster Signature Ink's Fire & Ice isn't going to go anywhere, River of Fire hopes to be the successor to Fire & Ice's crown. Like Fire & Ice, River of Fire has a great name and a border of sheen. The ink colour itself was created based on the colour of Rob's boyhood local river green (though I assume that river wasn't made of fire!)
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