Bake A Custom Dip Pen

[MKB]

Here's a fun project for making a dip pen holder with baking clay. You can even customize it to your grip if you want.

 

It uses Kato Polyclay which you bake in your oven. I recommend this specific brand for its combination strength and ridigity. Others may be too flexible or brittle. I used black and gold in the example. The blocks come scored and I used a little less than three sections. I rolled the pieces into separate ropes to soften them, then I rolled them together, folding in half and twisting the length until the color pattern looked like I wanted. Roll while pushing or pulling to get the shape. I made mine a little thicker than my standard wood holder and I pressed my fingers in a little for a custom fit. The holder without the flange weighs 19 grams. It feels fairly light and balanced, but could easily be made lighter with less clay.

 

There's a good video by the Yoke Pen Company about how to make a flange to hold the nib. On my first try to bake a holder with a flange in place, it didn't go so well, so I made the insert tool pictured below, which worked great and has the advantage of lining up the flange with the center axis of the pen holder. Once the general shape of the pen was done, I inserted the long rod first and cut most of the side slit with an exacto blade to make inserting the flange insert tool possible without disturbing the pen shape. I baked the pen with this in place for 1 hour and 20 minutes at 300 degrees F inside a cheap foil baking tray with another inverted on top and held in place with binder clips. This was to reduce the internal temperature swings and vinyl smell. (The pen doesn't smell.) I placed the pen on baking parchment that was accordion folded, but that is optional.

 

Have fun! You could really do some creative ideas with this stuff.

[holgalee]

This is really cool! Thanks for sharing. It's always great to pick up diy tips, and a diy dip pen is an extra bonus!

[MKB]

Thanks! After using it for a while I've found that the cured plastic clay can be easily rinsed with no worry about water damage. Gotta like easy cleanup.

 

Caution: The unbaked clay holds the flange tool pretty well, so as an experiment I baked a pen hanging from the tool. It didn't work, as it eventually slid off and fell. Good thing I put some foil down first.

[Intellidepth]

Great idea.

[MKB]

Here's an idea of what can be done with this stuff.

[tbaretta]

What an amazing concept! It's really inspirational!

I have a quick question - what is that pin that you are using to hold the flange in place when it is completed?

[MKB]

  On 12/6/2015 at 10:47 PM, tbaretta said:

What an amazing concept! It's really inspirational!

I have a quick question - what is that pin that you are using to hold the flange in place when it is completed?

Thanks. I imagine people could make a wide range of these from a simple one color job to ones with all kinds of crazy stuff or shapes.

 

The little pin I am using on the completed pen holder is just a brass finish nail that I had sitting around, probably from a picture hanging hook.

Edited December 7, 2015 by MKB

[Inspector]

Cool pen. Makes one think of Squid ink.

[IrishEyes]

OMD! Now you HAVE to send me that gorgeous octopus tentacle oblique pen holder! I NEED this!

 

Seriously, though--I have a real "thing" about octopuses (which, I am told by staff at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, is the correct spelling for more than one octopus, not what I had always thought, which was "octopi"). I love nice quality art about them, and that tentacle is a work of art! Fun, and whimsical, too :-). Absolutely beautiful, and wouldn't that make learning Copperplate even that much more special? If you ever make those for sale, let me know :-).

Edited December 10, 2015 by IrishEyes

[MKB]

  On 12/10/2015 at 6:08 AM, IrishEyes said:

OMD! Now you HAVE to send me that gorgeous octopus tentacle oblique pen holder! I NEED this!

 

Seriously, though--I have a real "thing" about octopuses (which, I am told by staff at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, is the correct spelling for more than one octopus, not what I had always thought, which was "octopi"). I love nice quality art about them, and that tentacle is a work of art! Fun, and whimsical, too :-). Absolutely beautiful, and wouldn't that make learning Copperplate even that much more special? If you ever make those for sale, let me know :-).

That one already has a home. I'm not planning to make these due to the time involved; however, I might be able to help you out. Message sent.

[IrishEyes]

  On 12/11/2015 at 6:44 PM, MKB said:

That one already has a home. I'm not planning to make these due to the time involved; however, I might be able to help you out. Message sent.

 

And replied to . Just curious--do you use a wire "framework" inside of the holder, or something else to strengthen the thinnest parts? When I work with polymer clays, I tend to use a combination of wire framework and aluminum foil to reduce the bulk of the clay when making fairly thick sculptures. Just curious if you do the same? I'm just a "dabbler" with Fimo, Sculpey, etc., clays, and I like to hear about how others go about using them, and how they deal with the same kinds of challenges I sometimes find myself trying to deal with.

[MKB]

The Kato polymer clay has good strength; however, thin parts will break if over stressed. I rolled the thinnest part into a coil to provide structural support where it touches and to reduce exposure. This pen holder is solid polymer. I imagine making it with something in the core might interfere with forming and stretching it to shape for this one. You could try an experiment to see.

[ProfChallenger]

  On 12/10/2015 at 6:08 AM, IrishEyes said:

Seriously, though--I have a real "thing" about octopuses (which, I am told by staff at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, is the correct spelling for more than one octopus, not what I had always thought, which was "octopi").

Oooh oooh, trivia I know! Octopuses is indeed correct, however the word is actually Greek, making the most correct plural actually octopodes. This is because it is Greek, disguised as Latin. For this reason, octopi is usually considered grammatically incorrect, but has been added to most dictionaries as an alternative, due to it's widespread use. Octopodes is an older, more archaic word, and so is less commonly used, while octopuses is the generally accepted English plural. Words are weird

[MKB]

I've discovered that a cone of baking parchment held with masking tape is very useful for keeping a holder straight while baking. However, for this pen holder a support of aluminum foil did the trick.

Edited December 14, 2015 by MKB

[LeonW]

Beautiful, I think it is time for me to make my own holder. I would appreciate it to get your instructions email if you would please.

[MKB]

I might as well post the instructions here, so anyone that wants to do it can. I'll start with the basic holder and finish with the octopus tentacle. It's not that hard to do, so don't worry about the long list of instructions. I am just going to give more information than is really needed in order to give helpful tips and cover questions that might come up.

 

Recommended Supplies & Tools:

Most items purchased at Hobby Lobby and the last at a hobby store more geared to RC vehicles

• Kato Polyclay. (I have come across some packages that were slightly crumbly, so order from a high volume seller to get fresh, or give a little squeeze if purchasing in person.)
• Polyblade for cutting clay slices and lifting rolled out clay (not needed for basic holder)
• Brass Sheet .010 x 4 x 10 inches - K & S Precision Metals (for flange)
• Bailing Pliers one side 3mm, the other side size is not critical (for forming curve of flange)
• Straight Needle Nose Pliers smooth without teeth (for forming flange)
• Tin snips or scissors (for cutting brass - I use Dollar Store scissors)
• Metal rod approx. 0.55" or 1.4 mm x 5" (mine came from a 3 foot length but was pretty inexpensive. I cut it to length and filed the end to round it a bit.)

Make the flange insert tool (pictured above in the first post) which is used for forming the slot in the clay for the flange and holding pin. The tool also remains inserted while baking the holder. Cut a V shaped piece of the brass sheet about 1/2" wide and 1.25" long on each side with a 110 degree opening of the V. This V is folded on the center line around a 5" section of the metal rod and crimped tightly around the rod. A small tab can be folded over on the ends of the brass sheet to hold it together as glue might not work in the heat of the oven.

 

Basic Holder:

Cut off a little less than three sections total from the color(s) you have selected. Soften them by rolling them into long ropes of individual colors. These can be folded two or three times and rolled into another long rope. Sometimes a little twisting of the folded bunch helps to make them blend into one rope again. Go slow to keep from crumbling before fully softened. Repeat with remaining colors.

 

Combine the different ropes of colors by laying next to each other twisting the bunch a bit and rolling into a log. This log can be rolled out, twisted and folded a few times until you get the desired striping complexity. If you do it too many times, the colors begin to blend. (I have done this step with scraps that were not carefully rolled out into ropes first, and it still ended up looking very nice after rolling out the mass with twisting and folding several times. See pen with treble clef below).

 

Shape the log into a long taper of about 8 inches by rolling, stretching and twisting with more pressure on the narrow end and by scrunching the larger end together and pushing on the end towards the pen to thicken if necessary. If you feel that there is too much clay at this point, you can cut off either end. The actual shape is really up to you, this is just a traditional suggestion that puts most of the weight towards the front of the pen for good balance.

 

Once you have the holder shaped, use the slicing tool (or Exacto or razor blade) to cut nearly the full length of the slot in the head of the holder from the side to the center line. Next push the flange insert tool into the cut from the front to the end of the cut and just a bit further to fully seat. Reshape the head of the pen as needed making sure the clay is tight around the insert, but not covering the end, as it will need to be pulled out after the baked pen cools. The pen can be rolled a little bit to fix the roundness. Pushing the blade into the clay can flatten the opposite side a little, so if you want to go to more extreme, you can make a jig with a rounded bottom to support the pen while cutting. I used two dowels nailed to a board with a sheet of paper wrapped around the structure to make a rounded hammock between the dowels.

 

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit (check with oven thermometer). Bake holder for 30 minutes. The simplest method is on a piece of aluminum foil or parchment paper. However, to get more even temperatures, I baked on top of a ceramic tile and within two aluminum foil baking trays inverted and clipped with binder clips.

 

After doing this a few times, I found out that a straighter pen can be assured by baking it in a tapered tube of parchment paper secured with masking tape. I cut a slot a the top to make space for the protruding flange tool.

 

Make sure to let the pen fully cool for 30 minutes without disturbing it, as it is still flexible when warm and can easily be weakened if bent at all.

 

Make the Flange:

Christopher Yoke has an excellent video on how to easily make the flange:

 

How to Make the Octopus Tentacle Pen (photos below):

Obtain Kato polymer clay in two colors for a transition if desired plus White and Translucent. Using white is optimal, but not absolutely necessary.

 

Work with very clean hands and work surface. If you have a pasta maker, you can do a Skinner Blend (Google to see how) to get the transition you want from the main color to the tip color. I don't have a pasta maker, so I start the Skinner blend process with the usual triangles of hand rolled clay and then stack strips of the layers followed by cutting the long stack into many sections (the more sections, the smoother the final color transition). Those sections are individually blended by hand to incorporate the color until fully blended, then each of those sections are assembled, in order, into a tootsie roll shape which is rolled maintaining the shape to connect the sections better. With either method, the color on the end of the tentacle ends up getting stretched out for most of the length, so make the blend with a very narrow tip color section and a longer thick section color.

Either way you do it, the blend gets rolled out into an approximate 1/16 inch thick rectangle measuring 3 x 4 inches (the color transition is across the narrower dimension). This gets rolled around a tootsie-roll shaped core of white clay 3" long and 1/2 to 3/4 inches thick, and trimmed where the color exterior meets. The excess blend is cut off and rolled thinner, then rolled around another smaller core of the white blended with the transparent clay for the suction cups. (I recommend 1 part white to 16 parts translucent. Even 100% translucent actually looks pretty good, although tends to blend in on the narrow part of the tentacle.) The exterior joins are smoothed together and each roll is rolled while maintaining the shape to improve attachment of the joints and exteriors to their cores.

Each roll is individually rolled while pushing on one end of the roll to stretch it out making the pen shape (or suction cup diameter transition).

I recommend inserting the flange tool mentioned and pictured in the forum thread on the pen roll now, as it will require some pressure to get it into place and you want to avoid ruining completed suction cups on the tentacle. Smooth any fingerprints.

Lay out the tentacle body in a straight line. Off to the side lay out the suction cup tapered piece with the end you are cutting off slices closer to you. Use the blade (or any thin blade) to cut off thin slices. They usually stick to the blade and can be removed and positioned on the tentacle arm with a rounded metal rod (sometimes the slices aren't completely round after slicing, so I push them back into shape. I used the rod to push each suction cup to the body. The rounded tip helped make the smallest ones look like suction cups and worked great to make the central divot on the larger ones.

Once completed, I placed the tentacle on a support I made out of a single layer of aluminum foil pushed into the general curves and undulations that would be helpful. Bake it in the aluminum baking trays as described. Let fully cool for 30 minutes before touching it at all (seriously). Before then it is still soft and any movement of the clay will weaken it (learned this the hard way). Remove the flange tool insert (with pliers if necessary).

Let me know if I missed anything or if anyone has questions.

Edited January 3, 2016 by MKB

[MKB]

Forgot the treble clef pen. Here it is.

 

 

[Inspector]

While I have played a little with Polyclay before and have no intention of making a pen with it I appreciate the time you took to show us how to make a dip pen with it. Thank you for the flange making demonstration too. That will be something I play with when I have a shop again.

 

Pete

[MKB]

You're welcome. I think it's clear, but just in case, that's Christopher Yoke demonstrating how to make a flange. He makes beautiful oblique pen holders which you can order through his website. (Not affiliated, just a happy client.)