Fountain pens, dip pens, inks...
There are a wonderful range of colors to write with when you expand beyond the standard ballpoint or rollerball. But it isn't just the range of colors, it's the range of expressiveness a fountain pen can have.
It is a world that fascinated me early, before my teens, when I had the opportunity to attempt calligraphic writing. My mom ran a children's program (fodder for an entirely different type of blog one day perhaps) and I had exposure to some extremely cool experiences and some very talented artists and crafters due to that.
I gathered various pens and inks through high school and college and somewhere along the line -- a few years into daily work life -- they got used less and less, until they got boxed up and forgotten. That is, until a wonderful person who entered my life made an offhand comment that he'd like to try fountain pens to see if it would help him improve his writing a bit... as well as just being curious about them.
Little did he know what would ensue next. "Fountain pens, hmmm?" Time to dig into the boxes and find the long lost treasures. Dan is an info collector, RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts - always forwarding me something new, interesting and so observant of my interests. I'm an info collector too, but I'm really an object collector.
The first set of pens I had was the rather large set of speedball dip pens.
From there it was a slippery slope of dip pen acquisition, leading to ink acquisition. Then I found fountain pens. Welcome to my world.