For some absurd reason I got it in my head that I’d like to pare down my ink collection to 100 bottles or fewer. This random number, 100, seems like more ink that I could ever use in my lifetime or need, right?
Thinking about the ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) color spectrum — that’s seven colors and if I add brown, black and grey to this, then that’s 10 color groups. If I select 10 bottles in each group (and really, who needs 10 blacks and 10 greys?!!?) then surely 100 bottles is enough to have a wide variety of shades and hues while, theoretically, making my collection a bit more manageable.
I thought, at first, that that wouldn’t be too difficult as I’ve already done a bit of culling over the last few months.
No. I have some serious work to do. Step One, for me in this process, was to get a sense of just how many bottles of ink I currently own.
I have an entire Ikea Alex filled with bottles of ink. Many of these inks I don’t use or even remember that I have. Some are inks I reach for over and over (I’m looking at you, Birthday Cake!).
To start, I just counted how many bottles are in each drawer and made a list of the totals per drawer. I didn’t count all the mini bottles from the Diamine Inkvent calendars (those don’t count, right?). I also didn’t count the little refill/sample sized bottles from Ferris Wheel Press because they are basically samples and that’s a whole separate category of inks I’m not even ready to talk about yet.
I also have a shelf of Colorverse inks still in their boxes (22 boxes x 2 bottles per box… oof, that’s another 44 bottles!). And several Colorverse sets (I think there’s three sets). Then there’s the random bottles of ink tucked here and there. I’m actually starting to feel shamed by the enormity of this task.
So, the sloppy total is over 350 bottles (oops, I found a bottle on my desk and another in the “to be reviewwed pile”, etc). To get down to 100, I will have to cull out 250 bottles! Maybe this task it too ambitious?
My next step is to choose an approach for the process. I considered collecting all the reds together, regardless of brand and then orange, and so on. However, my drawers are organized by brand rather than color so I might start by pulling all the swatches so I can arrange the swatches by color and start making my selections that way.
Getting this far, just counting all the #$%^! bottles of ink, took me a whole afternoon. This project is going to be a lot more time consuming than I initially thought.
If you were going to cull your ink collection, what criteria would you use? Stay tuned for Phase Two!
The post My Ink 100: Part 1 – Admitting I Have a Problem appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.