A few facts about the Inkistry Lab:

1. Most of the bottles are 100ml, though a few are smaller.
2. I clean the tools as best I can each day.
3. I use small blunt-tip syringes (most fountain pen users use these a lot) with gradations up to 5ml on the cylinder.
4. I use a tabletop inkmiser as the mixing vessel.
5. I then draw the ink into a medium nib Pilot Prera for the written parts of each day’s experiment.
6. I use a cotton swab to make the two swatches (the big on in my Hobonichi Weeks and the small one in the back of my Hobonichi planner).
7. The entire written portion (swatches and writing) is done on Tomoe River paper. This paper is known among fountain pen lovers for its ability to bring out characteristics of ink. Most of these inks would look very different on the ordinary copy paper we use most of each day.
8. I photograph the results as best I can with my iPad camera.

And now here are a few concerns:

1. The syringes aren’t terribly accurate. They don’t fill completely, leaving pockets of air, so “1ml” really means “my best stab at 1ml”. (2ml of ink will write for a very long time, so I don’t really want to create tons and tons of ink).
2. I worry about polluting the inks in their original bottles, and have pondered ordering separate syringes for each bottle.
3. Once I dip the swab, I have no precise control over how much ink is soaked up. So when I add ink the next day, it’s really not based on terribly scientific amounts.
4. There has been a problem with the pooling of ink (see below) at the end of the nib, resulting in a glob of ink in the middle of writing. I have not yet determined if this is a result of the pen alone, the ink alone, the paper alone, or some combination of these.
5. Some of the saturated inks are REALLY saturated. Don’t get me wrong, I adore saturated inks. But there is both ghosting (when you can see the writing from the other page) and bleed through, sometimes in significant amounts. Granted, the bleed through is from a pretty massive amount of swatches ink.