I found them!

After years of unsuccessfully searching for those old, cheap, used-to-be-sold-in-grocery-stores Sheaffer pens, I finally found some on eBay. Still haven't managed to locate a transparent purple one, but clear, transparent blue, green, red, & black aren't bad! (Lamy Vista included for size comparison)

I used these all through high school and into college, to write letters to my friends, to write stories, sometimes even to draw with. I knew nothing about fountain pen maintenance at that time, and just stuck in a new cartridge whenever the old one ran out. I'd also switch colours all the time, and some of my notebooks have the most interesting gradation of colours as things went from, say, emerald green to lavender, or turquoise to red. (Brown to turquoise was pretty unattractive...) Ahh, nostalgia...

A plethora of Pilot Petit 1 cartridges

In my last post, I mentioned that I did a bit of panic-buying when I thought that the Petit 1 was being discontinued. None of the locations I tried had any purple cartridges left, but they did have a number of other colours...

I had already collected a number from my various Jet Pens orders, but I also bought a whole lot from MaiDo Stationery (they still have some, including the possibly-discontinued dark green):

I love the Japanese packaging - those nifty plastic bags with the reusable sticky closure. As a long-time anime fan, I'm very familiar with them, and was amused to find them here, too. All my little plastic capsules full of cartridges (3 per little capsule), packed in a Japanese plastic bag. Here's another picture, where you can see some of the labels, sort of. You can at least see some of the colour families:

However, those cute little plastic capsules are terrible on storage - they just take up too much room with too few cartridges inside them. So, since I had a number of small ziploc baggies from other purchases, I took all of the cartridges out of the capsules, and put them into baggies by colour. To be able to tell which ones are what, I peeled the little plastic labels off the capsules, and stuck them on the baggies (since I can read Katakana, it was easier to just use the original labels than write on each one or make my own labels.)

Whew! Should last me a bit before I have to buy any more...