Picture(s) a Day: May 1

Let me preface this with a warning. What I'm going to show in these pictures is gross. Depending on your sensitivity, it may not be that gross, or it could be pretty gross. You've been warned!

Anyway, today I discovered, horror of horrors, that a fountain pen ink I just recently bought is moldy. 😱 And what's worse is that I inked a pen with it, and I found out the pen is moldy, too. 😡 It's one of my nicer pens, to top it off. GRRRR.

I was swatching a bunch of inks for #InkSwatchWednesday today when I opened my bottle of Lennon Tool Bar Sesame Oil and saw this:

Disgusting!!! I still dipped a paintbrush into the ink to add the swatch of currently inked, because I didn't yet know the status of the pen I have inked with this. I thought perhaps maybe the mold developed in the bottle after I inked the pen... Don't worry, I didn't use the same paintbrush or water container for any of the other ink swatches. That would've been a bloody nightmare, ruining a bunch of my other inks via contamination! I switched to completely different tools for the rest of my swatching. I guess this could be an argument for using disposable cotton swabs for swatching. 😝

I looked more closely at the feed on my Leonardo Momento Zero and saw it was also moldy:

OMG! And I didn't even realize until I was slightly editing these photos that the mold is also around the top edge of the nib housing, not just the feed. :shudder: Now I have to research how to clean moldy pens and hope nothing super bad has happened to the pen itself, which I don't think it has, but who knows? Thank goodness it's not a piston-filler, but a cartridge-converter. Phew... Worse comes to worst, I could toss the converter, feed, and housing and get replacements.

What a PITA. 😡