In January of 2024 I decided that I had bought far too many pens throughout the previous year, capping out at a whopping 95. I wanted to try and get in control of my Pen Purchasing Problem™, and I think I succeeded with that. I managed to reduce it down to just 69 last year, which is a ~25% reduction. That's not bad! Sure, it's still a lot, but it's a decent improvement. I'll speak more on some of these pens later. Inks on the other hand—now that's a different story...

I exactly doubled my ink collection last year with 170 different inks acquired (~60 of which were 2-5ml samples), bringing me to a grand total of 340. And here I thought I had a pen problem! However, unlike with my pens, I don't think I'm going to try and curtail my ink purchases this year. At least, not intentionally. One of the factors that added to the total last year was that I wanted to complete my Inkvent Blue collection, so that was ~23 inks sought out for a specific purpose that wont need to happen again, but other than that my habits will be roughly the same.

The Cult Pens Ink Subscription was a large contributor to my collection when it started back up again in March as a rolling subscription instead of the 3-month version from 2023. I've been loving these little boxes which bring me 5-6 new inks in 10ml bottles each month—sometimes even including full-size bottles of ink—along with a bonus stationery item. Often times they're inks that I would never have bought myself but I ended up loving. You'd think with the size of my collection that dupes would be a problem with an ink subscription like this, but I've only had 3 or 4 since they started. Perhaps this will become more of a problem as my collection continues to expand, but for now whenever I do happen to get a dupe it'll give me inks that I can then share with others!

So what have been my favourite inks from 2024? Well, I've got a lot to pick from but I'll try to keep it short(ish). They don't necessarily need to have been released in 2024, just that I bought them during that timeframe.

Favourite Standard Inks

• ColorVerse Goryeo Celadon

• Birmingham Pen Co. Fire Hydrant

Goryeo Celadon is an ink exclusive to the retailer BlueBlack in South Korea. I first fell in love with this ink when I hired a Visconti Homo Sapiens a couple years back which came pre-inked with it, but it took me a while to resolve account issues on their website and put together an order. It's a fabulous sage green that flows well and looks great on any paper.

Fire Hydrant is one of 5 Birmingham Pen Co. samples I received from the hub master of our local Pelikan Hub. It's the most vibrant red I've come across, even more so than my previous favourite Laban Ares Red.

Favourite Shimmer Inks

• KWZ Firecracker

• Robert Oster Campfire Crackle

Firecracker may well be the greatest shimmer ink ever made. The orange with gold shimmer isn't anything new colour-wise, but it's the properties of this ink that makes it so groundbreaking. KWZ weren't kidding when they stated they had found an "innovative way of stabilising particles in the ink, so that the naturally occurring sedimentation is significantly slowed" in their "All That Glitters" range. I'll be honest, I was pretty sceptical about this claim. When the bottle arrived the particles were already fairly well suspended, which was unusual, but I put it down to the box perhaps being jostled around during shipping. I gave it a good mix, then put it back in its box for later. When I went to swatch it the next day, the particles were still completely suspended! So after swatching, I filled it into a Jinhao 80, and left it untouched for a week. A little had settled, but the vast majority of the particles were STILL in suspension!! You're normally lucky if particles manage to stay suspended for more than a minute! The Stardust Blue ink from this series didn't fare quite as well, starting to settle after a day or so, but that's still impressive! I'll be picking up the other 2 inks in this series soon to see how they compare. It also helps that the ink is my favour orange-red colour, and the classic gold shimmer sets it off nicely.

Campfire Crackle is part of the Endless Pens exclusive "Cozy Comforts" range. It's in the orange-red range again, so that already makes it a favourite for me, but the black sheen with both dark & silver shimmer gives it a unique effect among the sea of shimmers.

Favourite Sheening Inks

• Octopus Fluids Phoenix

• Diamine Deadly Nightshade

Phoenix is an ink that you can't easily pin down what colour it actually is. It has a pink-ish base with a strong gold sheen, giving the ink an orange-ish appearance overall, with a strong emphasis on the "-ish" part. I did attempt to add even more colours into the mix by adding 2 different Pennonia Csillam shimmer additives, however I think the sheen overpowers them as I couldn't get it to show up even after adding 4x the recommended dosage.

Deadly Nightshade isn't a particularly unique colour, even among other Diamine inks. It has a purple base with purple & blue shimmer and strong green sheen, but what really sets it apart is its gimmick. You see, this was an ink released during Halloween, so in the 50ml bottle they added a few little plastic skulls as a fun little feature that also help to agitate the shimmer when you shake the bottle. That feature alone elevates the ink for me.

Favourite (Chroma)Shading Inks

• Dominant Industry Duftraush

• Hosia Ink Studio Mengchen

• Wearingeul Robinson Crusoe

• Sailor Yurameku Seki

• Diamine Inkvent '24 Marley

• literally any other chromashading ink I bought this year I love them give me more

2024 was the year of chromashading inks for me. If you're unaware of what I mean by "chromashading", it's an ink that exhibits more than one colour once dried. You'll also hear them refered to as multishaders. I've had a few Sailor chromashading inks like Fuji, 123, and 280 for a while now, but 2024 was when our options seemed to explode. There have been so many I've picked up this year that it would be impossible to pick just 2, so I've plumped for 5 inks from 5 different companies. I'll try to keep each one brief...

First up is one of my most recent chromashaders: Dominant Industry Duftraush from the "Twilight Gardens" series. It's a lovely dusky pink with shades of grey and teal coming through. Plus, it has a lovely rose fragrance to it that I get a gentle whiff off every time I uncap the pen. I know that may put some people off, but I really like it.

Hosia Mengchen (Mont City) wasn't what I expected. It was one of five chromashading inks I bought on AliExpress to try out Chinese inks for the first time. The product photo for it showed a bright orange with turquoise coming through. As you can see from the photo, that is not at all how it looks. Despite this discrepancy, I ended up really falling for this ink. It's a warm brown with shades of grey, blue, and teal showing through. It's a great ink that flows well & looks gorgeous on the page.

Wearingeul Robinson Cruseo is somewhat a rarity among chromashders in that its base is a bright turquoise with shades of blue, green, and yellow coming through. It's a very summery ink and I think it works wonderfully at reminding you of tropical waters on some deserted island.

Seki is from Sailors second Yurameku set, which is known for the way the colours change while drying. Date Gokoro from that set is easily in my top 5 all-time favourite inks, but Seki is no slouch either. It goes down a brownish colour before morphing into pink as it dires. It's a paler pink than Duftraush, but thanks to the greys and greens that join the party it's still perfectly legible.

Lastly, we have Marley from the Inkvent Black calendar. This was easily my favourite of the set with its dusky lilac, grey, and pink tones.

Favourite Pens

This post is mostly about inks, but I wanted to highlight some of my favourite pens I picked up during 2024, as they're some of my all-time favourites.

The first pen of the year was also one of the best—the Kanwrite Mammoth. An absolutely GIANT pen with a monsterous #9 nib that you can read more about here. They recently came out with a version with flat finials called the Mammoth X which I hope to pick up this year.

Of course, Endless Pens got me with one of their crazy sales again, this time being the Lamy 2000. After using one earlier in the year and loving it, I was going to go for the standard Makrolon model at a ridiculously low £100, but the steel version was only £20 more so I opted for that instead. I decided I wanted this to be a platform pen, so I got it with a 14k double broad nib which has a tonne of tipping for a nibmeister to work with. I haven't decided what I want to get it ground down to yet, but I've got a while to think about it. In the meantime, it's still fun to use as is.

There were 4 specific pens I wanted to pick up last year, but I only managed to acquire one of them, the Nahvalur 365 Schuykill Obsidian Pumpkin. And hoo-boy I'm glad this was the one I was able to get! The hammered sterling silver body feels amazing to hold & it writes wonderfully.

Bonus shoutout to another great hammerd body pen — the titanium Majohn P136, to which I added a hammered stub nib to complete the look. I guess I have a thing for hammered metal pens now.

The next pen is one I've been trying to find for years. Back when I worked at a printers/stationers, the pen I always carried around was the Pentel GraphGear 1000 Ball — a pen which many of you might not even know existed as it was discontinued somewhere in the late 2000's-early 2010's. Unfortunately, they had a nasty habit of snapping in the middle that its pencil counterpart doesn't seem to have despite them having practically the same construction, with many parts interchangeable between them. Because these are so rare now eBay prices tend to be ridiculous, reaching over £100 at times, but I eventually found someone selling one for not too much more than its original RRP & snapped it up to go with its 0.7mm mechanical pencil sibling.

There were also some great Kickstarters that were fulfilled last year in the Ensso Bolt and Namisu Nova Pocket Ultem. They're both excellent pens that I've enjoyed using a great deal throughout the year. I anodised the nib & section on the Nova, but I hadn't realised the section on the ultem model is steel, not titanium, so it took over 100 volts to get this slightly yellowed colour (it looks more yellow in the photo than it does in person). It also meant that when I anodised the titanium Bock nib afterwards I completely overcooked it. This seems to have changed the surface of the nib, giving it feedback like a Sailor nib on steroids. I might anodise the Bolt at some point as well, but likely not until I get a power supply instead of daisy-chaining 9v batteries.

Lastly, I got a lovely transparent orange version of the Pilot Iro-Utsushi dip pen. It hasn't supplanted the Sailor Hocoro dip pen with the fude nib for my main ink swatches (shoutout to the new Straight Stria body they released towards the end of the year), but I've been using it for making smaller swatches to go along with ink samples I was sending out to friends. I was surprised by how incredibly smooth and pleasant the medium nib was to write with, having only ever tried the extremely fine EF version of this Kakuno nib before. It also held the ink very well despite having no reservoir or feed. The only reason it wont be replacing the Hocoro for my swatch cards is purely due to the lack of line variation compared to the Hocoro's fude nib.

Honourable mentions go to the Sailor Tuzu, whose rotating grip section makes it one of the most comfortable to use pens I have (thank you, Brad!), and the Kaweco Sport Piston AL, one of the best pens modern Kaweco have ever produced, made even better with Galen Leather's excellent Dentist nib grind from their Carmine Sport.

Final Thoughts

To wrap things up, I want to have a look at how well I did with my purchasing intentions for last year. As mentioned earlier, I only managed to get one of the four pens I had planned on. Hopefully this year I'll be able to pick up at least one more, preferably the 743 FA. I'm looking forward to seeing what the Chinese brands will be releasing for the Year of the Snake, as well as what the PenBBS Year of the Dragon will be once it eventually arrives. I partially succeeded at getting more custom nib grinds, as I got a few pre-ground nibs from BobbyNibs on the ChinesePen Etsy for some Jinhao, Majohn, & Wing Sung pens. I didn't get a cursive italic or needlepoint, but I did kill two birds with one stone by getting a stacked nib on Endless's successor to the Creator: the Phantom. Granted, it hasn't been delivered yet, but it was bought in 2024 so I'm counting it (and will probably count it for 2025 as well!).

So, how much ink really is too much ink? Who knows? I'm certainly not at that point yet, and I feel like even if I were to double the size of my collection again I still wouldn't be there. The biggest challenge would be storage, but I'm good on that for now.

How much ink would be too much for you? What are your purchasing intentions for 2025? How well did you manage to keep to last years, if you had any? Let me know in the comments, on Mastodon, or you can shoot me an email.