New Ink: Endless Alchemy’s Candy Sea and Wearingeul’s Swatch Cards

I got a new ink (because I somehow need more ). This ink is from Endless Alchemy, a new ink maker who is based in Madras (also known as Chennai)*, India. I don’t think I have any inks from India and now I do! As always, I strongly prefer to collect inks from ink makers of color and India has a rich history when it comes to ink.

I got it because the bottle is interesting, the color is pretty and it sheens. Das’ it.

Look at the pretty box!

The bottle looks like a cross between Sputnik and a science beaker. I like interesting bottle designs. It’s how I got into Korean inks Dominant Industry (looks like a light bulb upside down) and Colorverse (looks like a minimalist depiction of a bird). Like one ink maker in Mexico, Monarca, Endless Alchemy inks come with a base. But this base is different: it is cork and has two features, one side for upright, one side for rotating.

Look at the pretty bottle!

The ink bottle has a bulb at the bottom, which sits the bottle on a tilt. It almost makes the bottle a fiddly toy (have the cap on if you do this), but it’s great for if you have the shimmer variety of ink or you like your bottles on an angle when you refill your fountain pen. When you have the cork coaster base on the rotating side, it rotates freely but not right off your desk. When you have it on the other side, where there’s a cut out, it sits the bottle upright.

Topsy TurvyPlain and Straight

The bottle is 45ml and the color is deep watery blue with a heavy sheen, which I like. I like sheening inks. I saw this through watching a livestream walk through of a fountain pen convention from Inkpendence (he is very helpful in finding new inks, random stuff I don’t need but very much want, and more! I follow his channel) The price is pretty ok, $18 for a bottle. You’re getting years worth of writing ink so you won’t be running through it that fast, unless you’re writing hundreds of pages at a time. Even with hundreds of pages at a time, you’re still going to have something left for a nice long while

I also got stylized swatch cards, cards that are meant to be swatched with fountain pen inks but when you put down the ink, it reveals an artsy design underneath.

Check out the sheen in that lettering!

Colorverse was the first to do it with its nebula pack, I think. It looked like a regular white index card but once you smeared fountain pen ink on it to swatch it, you would see an outline of stars. There are also different kinds, like wavy waves or stacked houses, every one a complete delight to look at when you test out your inks. Wearingeul, who is also in Korea, has been really pumping these out.

And I wunted it. Wunt.

I already have my handmade ink journal that I made, the Ferris Wheel Press swatch book I got for free because I buy a bunch o’ stuff from Ferris Wheel Press buuuuuuuuuuuut, I don’t have a fancy swatch card set. Now I have 3 things to swatch inks with! (As if I need 3, only the ink journal matters since it is actually the paper I write my novels on.) I just like it because ooh, shiny.

I doubt the swatch cards can be used for anything else, it’s pretty niche to fountain pens and that’s fine by me. Swatch books and ink journals are useful so I don’t have to go through my ink collection bottle by bottle to find the right ink to write with, vibe-wise. I can just flip through my ink journal and go with that. No fuss, no muss.

So I now have the cards. I wanted one that wasn’t a full page, I wanted to have sides that I could still handle after swatching but I also wanted an interesting design so I went with the ink drop. I got it from Goldspot Pens, which had uber fast shipping and I super like their “new to fountain pens?” playlist on their youtube channel. It’s great for beginners and covers everything from handling to cleaning to troubleshooting. They also are the only ones (that I know of) that sells the pointed nibs for my Lamy stylus for my e-note. And they also sell Endless Alchemy’s ink, so I could bundle everything together for a Black Friday sale.

And they threw in a sticker.

Yes. I am a sucker for a sticker.

The cards are definitely a little different from what I was expecting. They really do work by isolating the ink – the vast majority of it, anyways. Maybe it’s from how I apply ink – I use a cotton swab and swish it on the paper side to side going downwards – but if I go outside the lines, the ink becomes teeeeny micro dots or small smeary, broken islands of ink. It isn’t bad or distracting, but it isn’t picture perfect. But it also depends on the ink, super sheeners will spot sheen around the ink drop, for example.

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However! Not a major problem! I found a solution for the spots. I just take a cotton swab, spritz one side with two shots of rubbing alcohol (don’t overdo it, sopping is bad), rub carefully over the dots a bit and then take the other end, the dry end, and rub on the same spot. For most of my inks, it does work and makes the ink swatch card look just about showroom ready. Others, all of them major sheeners, the vast majority of the dots are gone but a very small stubborn spate of speckle remains.

Do I like it? Yus. Will I buy more? It has about 60 cards, I think, in a set, so only if I somehow run through 60 different bottles of ink. I currently have less than 20, which I am happy with. It’s a bit gimmick but, honestly, it’s really super useful for people who want to swatch their ink and thus know what’s in their collection at a glance. I most likely will get a business card holder book so I can store these cards better than just use the original packaging. The cards are all about the size of a business card so they’re small and handy.

There’s two lines beneath the ink drop, which I also like, so I can write the ink brand on the top line and the name of the ink on the bottom line. I can’t do a smear test or things like that but I already have my original ink journal, which has that. Keeps things simple. I use a metal dip nib to write the info on the card, which I am starting to prefer exclusively for swatching inks. I like fountain pens to write my books, glass dip pens to sign my books and metal dip to swatch my inks and do short letters when I am too lazy to fill my fountain pen (and don’t want to worry about my glass dip pens).

Would I recommend it? Yah, especially if you have a sizeable collection and want something that entertains the eye. It’s always good to keep record of what you have, so you don’t buy the same color twice. It’s a lot of cards so it will be a while before you run through all of them.

I don’t buy ink the same way I did when I first started a couple years ago in 2022, where I bought a payload of ink. And moar ink. Now, I just buy ink if it has something super interesting about it, such as color, shimmer, bottle shape, etc. I’m fairly over my ink kick, especially since I have enough ink for literal thousands of pages. I can pause ink buying for a few years, while writing steadily and still not have to worry about running out of words.

*Named Chennai officially in 1996 but Madras has also been in use for a very long while. And it is on the bottle as “Madras”.