I’ve added a Pen Gallery to display examples of the types of pens that I make. You can click-through any photo to see a larger version on Flickr. While some of these photos are availble in old blog posts, and all of them are on my flickr page, this provides any easy way to have a look at pens I’ve made in the past. Keep in mind that not all of my pens are shown here, just a sample.

This was made a lot easier thanks to a handy wordpress plugin called flickrrss that uses (wait for it…) your flickr RSS feed to retrieve photos for display on a wordpress-managed site. I love it when simple tools do a job well.

 I just posted my first pen for a sale in a few months. It’s been so busy! This one is a beauty, and I expect to be posting some more soon.

Thanks for looking. Click-through to see some more shots.

You can see the listing here.

5 statesman pens for a commissioned order
Originally uploaded by patrickdylan

I finished these just the other night for an order. (well, I sold 4 of them, but some lucky wife got the cocobolo one on the right) Boy do I prefer the acrylics. Finishing the wood ones is getting to be a real pain, especially in the heat of the summer (no AC in the shop) when things don’t dry properly.

Cocobolo Gentlemen’s Pen
Originally uploaded by patrickdylan

This pen is now available in the store, and it’s my first screw-cap rollerball for sale.

On Wednesday night, my daughter and I went to the local booksigning by British author Jasper Fforde, well known internationally for his Thursday Next series of novels. (In fact I got my wife signed UK first editions of the whole series a while back because she’s such a big fan) My wife had the great idea to take him one of my pens, and even volunteered her favorite acrylic cigar because she thought it went well with the cover art on his books. So off we go, pen in hand, and we get there to find that the place is packed with hundreds of people and all copies of the new book are sold. I grabbed an older paperback of his and we got in line.

When we got to the front my daughter hands him the pen, and says “my dad made this for you.” He removes it from the sleeve and say “Wow! Brilliant!” (how british is that…) He then says “Monte Blanc… ppfffff!” and tosses aside his other pen. He used mine to sign all the books for the remainder of the line. He made sure to have my contact info so he would know who gave it to him.

To top things off, as we were leaving a salesperson found another box of the new books. So we grabbed one and got back at the end of the line! We got up to the front and I saw that he was still using my pen long after he thought we had left, which means he wasn’t just being polite. He thanked us again as he signed the new book.

So… of course I forget to bring the camera to this event (doh!) but luckily the fan club president was there with her excellent camera, and she was kind enough to take some photos to send me. She did a great job, here’s a photo of us with Jasper. (I blacked out my daughter because we don’t post public pics of the kids online.)

And Jasper signing a book with my pen:

The FC president also mentioned that Jasper commented on how much he liked the pen, both the look and feel, so that’s quite a complement coming from someone that has to use a pen for so long at one time.