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Showing results for tags 'mystery inks'.
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For every full bottle (≥25ml) of ink I order, KittyInkpot throws in a 5ml bottle of ‘blind box’ ink, up to a maximum of six of the freebies per order. These inks are unidentified, and for all intents and purposes unidentifiable, as the assumption is that they are mostly inks not released as any colour available for retail ordering, possibly results of experimental mixes that did not make it into some ‘season’ or limited edition set of releases, so even if you look at the chromatogram of one of these mystery inks, chances are it matches nothing else you have seen or could produce from known KittyInkpot ink colours. This is how many I've collected so far. The numbering of those inks was my own doing, and arbitrary at that. If I'm going to have to reliably pinpoint a particular bottle, the generic 盲盒 labels the bottles came with won't help. I'm not about to make my own ‘informative’ bottle cap labels by swatching the ink in each bottle on round white labels, even though I have those; and it is not inconceivable that some bottles in my collection will contain identical inks. I have some sheets of preprinted, water-repellant, round number labels (running from 1 to 100 on each new sheet) from which numbers 1 to 24 have already been taken when I packed several ink advent calendar sets last year, and so I may as well make use of what is left on the used sheets, when there aren't many other applications that meaningfully or conventionally begin enumerating from 25 or 30 or 66. For this particular thing, the number itself has no significance other than being a unique marker or identifier. I started numbering the small bottles from 40 sequentially, and even so, I'm close to running out of numbers! I suppose I could have started from 30, but I wanted to keep a long enough run of consecutive smaller numbers for the 25ml bottles. I still don't know what I'm going to do with all that. For now, all the small bottles still fit inside the small cardboard box in which my Sailor leather 5-pen case came. As much as I find no joy in swatching inks, I may just have to do that for at least all 52 inks (which may or may not contain duplicates) in the small bottles, if not also the six larger ones, then post photos of the swatches (and perhaps writing samples, although those will be far less useful than someone may imagine) and see if anybody in my local, ‘private’ Facebook group of hobbyists want to buy individual bottles from me, once ⑴ they have seen how each one looks, and ⑵ they know it's not something they can just order from KittyInkpot or some other source when they're ready, but must treat it as a one-off (even though no doubt someone else somewhere in the world will unknowingly have a small amount of a particular ink in my ‘collection’. I'll also just pack the swatch cards and writing samples into the shallow space in the box that is above the bottle caps, and bring that to me to local monthly meets, to see anyone there wants to buy this bottle or that one having seen the swatch first-hand, and without having to pay for shipping as part and parcel of the transaction. Sharing that as a ‘free’ resource for interested parties to either put into their fountain pens, or add to their swatch books (or card decks, or any other physical form of cataloguing) because they have an almost separate hobby out of swatching inks, is not on the cards however, for now.
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