How I organise my inks

When you have a lot of inks, it can be difficult to remember what you own to know what to use next, when inking your pen. Keeping all of your inks in one, visible location, can be difficult when boxes/bottles are stacked neatly into cupboards and shelves and it’s a bit of a palaver to pull them all out to browse what you have.

In order to overcome this, I aliquoted all of my inks out into smaller sample bottles, which are all stored into one drawer. This has the added benefit of not contaminating your main bottle if you have a pen that hasn’t been completely cleaned out and has remnants of the previous ink in the feed.

In addition to this, I have a swatch book which I keep to show what the swatches of the various inks I own look like.

It’s a pretty basic system, but it works for me. I like that I can keep my inks stored away in the dark (hopefully meaning that they will keep for longer) and that I don’t contaminate the full bottle if I’ve been a bit lazy and haven’t washed out a pen completely. These sample bottles seem a bit more stable to me (as in it feels harder to tip over) so I feel less stressed using this style compared to the tall/skinny type that’s commonly found in pen stores, although they are a fair bit more expensive.

The downsides of this system is that you need an additional container (which may be more expensive, as mentioned before) and that you have to refill them. If you’re anything like me, I have great intentions to refill them but then forget and keep moving to another ink instead. A minor gripe to be honest and it does mean I will probably use a lesser used ink as a result.

How do you store and organise your inks?