(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)
Patrick Ross became a pen maker because of his grandfather, but that didn’t happen the way you might think. His grandfather was a woodworker, who’d felled a tree, milled the wood from it, and made a bed headboard. Ross was already a woodworker, making displays for military awards and medals under the business name The Case Works, so when his grandfather passed away he was the only one who wanted the headboard – “it was a little crudely made.”
Ross had recently met someone near his home in Texas who turned kit pens, so he gave him the wood from the bed and asked for it to become pens for his aunts and uncles in memory of their father. “I watched him and thought, ‘I can do that!’” That wood turner was a pastor whose first congregation turned out to have been the same church in Arkansas where Ross’s grandfather was buried - “small world!”
Because he’d been in the Navy and was already creating military-related items, Ross decided to work with historical wood, and one of his first sources for materials was a company in Philadelphia called Metro Machine that dismantled decommissioned ships. Although there isn’t much wood in ships anymore, he was able to get some wood from some well-known navy vessels, and he made pens, and then tie clips and cufflinks, from it. In tandem with receiving reclaimed wood, he enjoyed doing research on the history of the ships so that he was aware of where the wood had been in its career. At a craft show, a little girl looked over his booth and then told him, “You know, girls like history too.” He told her she was absolutely right, and he started making pendants, earrings, and bookmarks as well.
In 2015, he got his first triple-start taps and dies to make kitless pens, “and then I realized how much tooling was going to cost!” At first, he took a hybrid approach, making rollerball pens using kit-pen sections.
Two years later, Ross and his wife decided to sell their house and live in an RV traveling around the country, so he spent four and a half years in an RV with his turning supplies and made pens and gifts on the road. This fit well with his interest in military topics, as he was able to travel to different bases to show off his wares. However, COVID led them to drive the RV back to Texas and be locked down in it, so he rented a storage shed to work in, and he decided to learn to cast his own materials. At first he cast some of his historical pieces – relics - in clear tubes to be used for making kit pens.
With the easing of COVID restrictions, the Rosses decided to give up RVing and move to Virginia. “We’ve got four seasons here! What I missed about Texas was my 1500 square foot shop, but it turned out the new house had a nice basement.” At the same time, he finally finished acquiring the tooling to make kitless pens, and equipment to cast his own colored materials. “It was exciting. You can make your own designs and not be limited by kits.” He took an intentional approach to learning the kitless process. “I learn things in a segmented way. I learned the basics first, using Bock sleeves, concentrating on bodies and caps, then did sections.” He now prefers Jowo #6 nib units – “they give you freedom with section lengths.” Once he was confident of his skills, he began integrating historical materials into artisan pens.
At the 2014 Dallas pen show, he got an important piece of advice from Shawn Newton. “He said I needed to get on Instagram.” He didn’t actually get serious about Instagram until 2022; some of the early pens he posted there were made from wood from a poplar tree from Monticello and from York Minster in England (which had been renovated following a fire), and they were well received.
All pen makers come at some point think about how to set their own work apart from everyone else’s. Ross was already working with interesting historical materials and making his own blanks. He had a laser engraver for marking historical items and designing his display boxes, so he turned it to working on pens. He now makes a series of resin pens with designs engraved into them and filled with engraver’s color fill, which resemble Japanese chinkin. “A maker is like a doctor – once they learn the basics they figure out their specialty and what makes them get up and go to work. I enjoy making pens so much that I keep making all kinds of them. I don’t like being locked into making the same thing over and over.” Some of his more striking designs have used civil-war uniform buttons in cap finials, or bodies machined from parts of World War II airplanes – a B-17 fire extinguisher rack, a cast aluminum casing for a B-29 fuel gauge, part of a control housing for a B-52 tail gun. What he makes depends on what interesting materials he’s able to source at any given time.
Sometimes those pens find their way to people for whom they have true meaning. Ross has been attending the Dallas pen show for about ten years; one year at the show, a man walked up to his table who had been commanding officer on a ship whose wood was in a pen on that table, made from the white oak base of a weapons locker. The admiral bought the pen, and has since come back for others. “I get such a charge out of the in-person interaction – someone’s eyes light up over a color or a historic item.”
Ross’s favorite pen that he didn’t make himself is a Pelikan M800 he found at an estate sale, but he’d rather talk about how many amazingly talented makers there are. “It’s a great community – the support you get on Instagram, from other makers and pen buyers, is really appreciated. Otherwise you’re just a little maker, working alone in your shop.”
Patrick Ross’s work can be seen on his Instagram @relicpens, his Etsy shop, and at pen shows in Baltimore, DC, and Dallas.