Janet working at the lathe
My name is Janet and I am a wife, a mother of two boys and a big fan of new challenges. I won’t bore you with my teens, 20’s and 30’s, but by my 40’s I’d pretty much realized my glory days on the athletic fields were over and it was time to pick up some individual hobbies. I had my golf clubs and sailboat for my occaissional outings with my buddies but I was looking for something I could do at home whenever I wanted to get outside and work with my hands.
I’d had a go at quilting, gardening, cooking, musical instruments, a home based business, and many other of the typical “domestic” hobbies women usually chose and although I found some of that rewarding, either I got tired of it or else I wasn’t too good at it (more the later).
I teach business and computer courses at a local high school and at that time shared a classroom in the afternoon with the shop/metal/woods teacher who would come inside in the afternoons and teach photography in my classroom. I asked him to let me know if he ever ran across an opportunity for women like me to take evening courses at the area technical college or anywhere in woodworking because that was something I was always interested in. After a few months of nagging him, he suggested I just come out during my lunch and learn along with the students. I took him up on it.
The students first project was a simple box. I learned to use a plainer, a joiner, the table saw, band saw to make a rake, and turned mine into a zen garden. Next I asked if I could build a computer desk. He said as long as I paid for materials it would be no problem. I built a desk that our desktop computer sits inside the cabinet and the monitor sits on top and all the cords are hidden before school got out. The next fall I used my lunch breaks to build a second desk for my youngest patterned after one I saw in a museum with a lot of slots and spaces, kind of like a rolltop without the cover.
Entertainment center part way done.
By the end of the school year I built an entertainment center for my oldest. It was during this time our science teacher came out and blew off some steam one day on the lathe.
I had passed by the lathe every day on my way out the door but didn’t realize what it was. It works much differently than any other woodworking machine. The science teacher told me how relaxing it was and so I ended up getting a few lessons on it and trying it out myself.
Fast-forward to the next October and my uncle from Montana brought me a lathe on his trip to Kansas. Brought me tools too! I made a few things: bowls, spindles, a bit of playing around. Then I had some health issues that kept me out of the wood shed for a couple of years. I won’t bore you with that either.
This October I got back in the woodshed again. My health could handle the sawdust and I found that the lathe was a real stress reliever for me. The woods teacher and I are still good friends but unfortunately our school moved locations and the woodshop hasn’t been set back up. By November I decided to take the plunge and buy what I needed to try making pens. It sure took me a lot of typing to tell you all this, huh?
The journey of learning to make a pen itself is pretty interesting to me. A lathe, a tool, and a mandrel along with some wood and the pen components and it is pretty simple. However, every wood (or acrylic, or antler, or corn cob, or whatever you make it from) is different, and has its own properties, and you have to allow for more than just gluing and cutting. For the first time in my life I feel like I am an artist thinking about a finished product before I start. The wood grain, what style pen to make, whether this wood should go with which color nib and clip, or would it look better as a fountain pen or rollerball? So many decisions to make before cutting into a blank of say, Snakewood, that cost $11.00 for a 7/8 x 7/8 x 5″. Then, knowing that Snakewood has a tendancy to easily break if the drill bit gets to hot I might need to allow for several hours of off and on drilling at a millimeter at a time just to keep from losing the blank that is so rare. It is not the $11.00 that is my concern in this situation, but the responsibility to not waste a valuable exotic wood that is nearly extinct.
Now I’m probably boring you. But maybe you can see why I find this so fun and so intriguing. I’ll try and update my blog periodically with pictures of my work. Thank you for taking time to look.
Sincerely,
Janet Sutter
thepenturner 