A couple of years back I made some ink sample cards. Those cards are great for keeping track of the inks I have in my collection. But I still bump into problems identifying inks: whenever I have to refill a pen and I want to use the same ink I used at last refill, I don't always remember which one I used for the pen in question. In addition, at times I want to change ink in a pen before I’ve emptied it, and in order to not be wasteful I want to put the ink which is left in the pen back into its bottle. But in order to do this I need to remember in which bottle it belongs, because if I put ink back into the wrong bottle, I’ll ruin the ink.
These are the operational hardships of modern life.
On a good day I can compare a writing sample from the pen with the cards in my ink sample archive, and that way decide which ink is in the pen. But sometimes making this distinction is not easy. So I decided that I will make an extra log, a simple sheet of paper that I store with my inks, on which I write down which ink is in each pen (and I also make a record of which date I filled the pen with that ink).
I won’t get an Archival Innovator Award. But it’s a procedure that works and is helpful.
