(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
I’ve been in a bit of a slump and it’s about all these inks I have around me. You see, I’m not only a Pen Addict, I’m an Ink Addict too. I absolutely love inks and matching them to pens is one of my favorite parts of this hobby. And while cutting back on ink purchases is probably never going to happen, I did tell myself that I needed to swatch more than I get. And so far, for 2024, I have failed miserably.
Why is this a problem? Because I don’t use what I don’t swatch. If an ink isn’t swatched, I don’t know what color it really is, and therefore, never ink it up because it’s not in my Col-O-Ring when I’m trying to match it to a pen. Not to mention, without the ink swatch, I sometimes forget I even have it, eek! I can hear my friend Judy, aka Tokubetsumemori yelling at me to “use your stuff!” (except she doesn’t say “stuff”, lol). I have added another 42 inks to my stash since January but I’ve only swatched 7 inks. Oof, going in the wrong direction here! To be fair, some of those inks were added for review (I put them in my Fountain Pen Companion account so I don’t accidentally buy inks that are in the review queue), and some of those inks were samples and not bottles, but still! I probably swatched about 200 inks in 2023 (and I’m nowhere near done), so 7 in the first 5 months of the year is not good progress.