About a year ago, I found an old 2 wheel Rolodex, and I planned to use this for my fountain pen ink swatches. What I did not realize at the time, is there is no way that I would ever be able to fill both sides, as my measly collection barely fills enough of one side, and I have no aspirations to have the largest ink collection or anything like that. This left me in a predicament of what do I do with the other side of the Rolodex.
A while back, Lisa of OliveOctopus.ink gave me the idea of doing a pen inventory on the other side. I liked this idea, but I hadn’t done anything with it. I was not sure of the best way to make it happen, but it did have me thinking through how that might work. Once I started to get into typewriters, I found myself with something else that I wanted to have a good inventory of, especially the typefaces of the various machines. I thought about using my Instax printer for images, but that was just too bulky, and I didn’t think that it would work well with the Rolodex setup.
I saw some people talking about the Canon Ivy printers, and that is when everything seemed to come together to make what had been in the back of my mind come to fruition. The Ivy prints on ZINK paper, and each photo is a peel back sticker. These happen to be the perfect size to fit on a Col-O-Dex card from The Well Appointed Desk, so once all of these factors combined, I had everything that I needed to start to populate the other side of my Rolodex.
Once I got all of the pieces in place, I got to work at creating what had been brewing for over a year. I went through all of my typewriters and took photos, and then did a typeface swatch on the opposite side of the cards. This will allow for a visual reference of the machine, as well as the typeface that comes on it. This will be handy to take with me to events where I might be talking about typewriters as well if people have questions. It took some time to get them all compiled, but here is what I came up with.
My Typewriter Swatch Cards
The typewriter cards ended up great, so now I am starting the process of working through my pens.
This has been a fun project, and will continue to go on for quite some time as I work on creating cards for my entire pen collection. The Rolodex turns out to be a great solution for organizing collections like this, so now the question is, what other collections need a similar style set of cards in the future.