Meet Your Maker: Alan Shrebtienko, On A Whim Woodworks

(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.)

Alan Shrebtienko started making pens “100% as therapy.” A high school physics teacher, and a longtime woodworker specializing in bowls, his life changed when he became so ill he spent more than five months in the hospital and emerged with much of his vision gone. “I couldn’t see well enough to return to teaching. It was my second career (after being a commercial construction superintendent,) and I absolutely loved it, and my students were really successful in their AP exams. I had more toys in my classroom than any kindergarten classroom in the state!”

Making a lot of bowls was a little too difficult given his new normal. “Pens were easier to see than bowls, and it seemed to be something people were buying.” After two years making component pens, he switched to making kitless pens, at about the time that everyone was locked down at home with time on their hands. Some of his segmented wooden bowls are still on display in galleries in the Louisville area, where he lives, but these days his shop is all about pens.

Shrebtienko’s long years of experience with wood turning have served him well in building his pen business. “I needed to develop a process that is repeatable and doesn’t require vision. I was determined to get it done, and kept doing it till I got it right. When you have a pen on the lathe it’s spinning so fast it looks stationary. Once I make the initial contact it’s pretty easy from there.” He approached photographing and shipping pens in the same way. “The setup for taking pictures doesn’t need touching, it’s the same every time. It took me almost as long to package my first pen for shipping as it did to make it. It’s all about consistency.”

Early efforts at making blanks didn’t lead anywhere productive. “The main thing I was making was a mess.” Instead, he sends photos to blank makers like Tim Crowe – the materials called “The Scream” and “Midnight Borealis” were inspired by his photos. “The guys who do this are like magicians.”

The need to establish a consistent repeatable process is somewhat at odds with Shrebtienko’s desire to learn new things and add personal touches to his pens. He has made one basic silhouette, the ‘Zephyr’, with a slight taper and flat ends, for a long time. “I should get an award for the most redundant maker.” But a surprising feature that has crept into his work is a variety of ink windows. “I started them because someone asked me to. I went through several iterations to get them down, and I can make them in any configuration – wide, narrow, multiples.” The process he developed required that he make his own molds, and involves cutting windows in an existing blank, then re-pouring around the blank and boring out the center to open the window to the inside.

Uniqueness is the main reason that his favorite pen right now is one made by Mad Science Pen Co. for the As The Pen Turns podcast Secret Santa exchange. “I can’t write with anything but a fountain pen anymore.”

When he’s not in the shop, Shrebtienko is deeply involved in the blind and vision-impaired community in his area. He lives near the Kentucky School for the Blind and the American Printing House for the Blind, and is working on a National Federation of the Blind audible Easter egg hunt at the School, with eggs that make a sound. Sighted kids can attend as well, but they participate blindfolded. “For most of these blind kids it will be the first time they’ve been able to participate in the egg hunt with their sighted siblings and friends.” When makers were creating pens in blue and yellow as a sign of support for Ukraine, he made a pen specifically to raise donations to an organization for blind Ukrainians.

The biggest new direction for Shrebtienko is metal work. “I like a clip myself, my desk isn’t level. But I’m not putting a $2 factory made clip on one of my pens.” He took a metalworking class and wants to design his own clips and roll stops, as well as finial coins (“I might need a logo…”). In the meantime, he recently developed a new pocket pen version of the Zephyr model. “It caps and posts using the same triple start threads and can be eyedropper filled or it will also use a standard cartridge. My prototypes kept coming apart when I was uncapping them, so I ended up putting reverse threads on the section and that keeps it all together really nicely. I’ve softened the edge around the cap so it easily slides in and out pocket or purse easily without snagging.”

Despite the focused effort required to develop his processes, fun is important to Shrebtienko and is reflected in the name of his business. “I’ve always been about whimsical bright fun.” He marvels at the extent to which the pen community has embraced his work.

“I’m not sure that I have expressed properly how much being part of the fountain pen community has done for me personally. I was having a pretty rough time when I had to leave teaching. I went from the classroom to sitting in my little dungeon. When I started making pens and putting them on Instagram, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but people started buying them. I was in shock, I couldn’t believe people actually liked my pens and were buying my pens! I was really in awe. This led me to make a whole new circle of friends - pen collectors, and makers, and writers, and just a whole list of neat people. It basically let me get out of my shop without actually leaving my shop. Being a part of the whole fountain pen world has really turned my dungeon into a functional workshop, and it’s allowed me to tell my story from the point of the victor and not the victim.”

Alan Shrebtienko’s work can be seen on Instagram @onawhim_woodworks and on his online shop.

Meet Your Maker: Rob Sanchez, Rob’s Penworks

(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.)

Rob Sanchez was done with his PhD in something to do with robotic exoskeletons, had a job at a biomedical company, and needed a hobby. Having taken a machine shop class in grad school he thought of tools, and bought a router. “That went nowhere - NOT my thing!” A friend was going to the local Rockler, and tossed him the catalogue to see if he needed anything; a component pen kit caught his eye and he said, “Oh bring me this pen kit, this looks cool.” To his surprise, it was just parts, and his friend explained you had to MAKE the rest of it on a lathe. Luckily, his neighbor was a former shop teacher and had all the equipment, so on Memorial Day weekend of 2015 he went next door to learn what to do with a wood lathe, and by the end of the day he was hooked. Within a month he’d bought a Jet wood lathe and a copy of The Pen Turner’s Bible, and wanted to make a red and black pen like a Cumberland ebonite pen pictured therein. Three months later he made his first kitless fountain pen, black ebonite with a Harry Potter theme using parts from a set of earrings.

Fountain pens didn’t figure prominently in what he did for a few years. “I made seven fountain pens in the first five years.” He became known around work as “the guy who makes pens” and co-workers would ask him for special pens for their special occasions. Inspired by the practical needs of his engineering colleagues, he began making X-ACTO knives. “They were running around from their cubes to the lab with X-ACTOs, and the caps pop off.” He made three-piece X-ACTO blade holders that look and operate like a pen, with a cap that screws on over the blade, and gave them as holiday presents to his colleagues. They understandably became quite popular. “That's where I got a lot of my practice on doing sections, doing bodies and caps and finials.” He makes them so that the blade-holding section can be removed and replaced with a fountain pen section.

After a few years, Sanchez ran across the work of John Mikulski of Midwest Hybrids, who made a lot of exotic blanks including not only real wood but also “faux-burl,” the result of a process in which a silicone mold is made from a natural wood burl so that you get the same kind of surface texture in a resin blank. Sanchez bought a number of blanks from Midwest, and ultimately made an X-ACTO knife for Mikulski out of one of his blanks. When Mikulski was approached by a client who wanted a fountain pen made out of a particular hybrid blank, he said, “I don’t really make pens, but I have a buddy…” and “all of a sudden, I became the glitter pen guy.” “I would constantly be on the phone with Midwest and I'm like, OK. I need this much burl and I need this color, and John finally said, “I'm going teach you how to do all of this so that you can do whatever you need on the fly for your clients.” He taught me how to make the silicone molds. He taught me how to cast glitter. And then he said, ‘Now remember, this is just the starting place, you are going to learn and morph this process to adapt to what you're trying to do.’”

Social media played a big role in this leap into glitter. “I was on Facebook for the most part, until a buddy said, ‘Hey you’ve got to move over to this thing called Instagram. That’s where everybody is at.’ And it’s been a nonstop train ride. I didn’t realize there was this massive community on social media. I discovered that there's pen clubs and there's online user groups and that kind of sucked me into the larger pen community.”

That pen community has embraced glitter pens with gusto. Working with blanks full of glitter is more time-consuming than using rods without glitter – you have to keep lathe speeds down so the blanks don’t explode - and as you turn down the glitter-filled resin, a piece can pop out and leave a flaw in the surface; this can also happen during sanding and polishing, requiring more time to refill the surface and begin again.

Sanchez has become part of a small group of makers who focus on using glitter – the Sparkle Siblings, the pen Glitterati, if you will - and they speak to one another constantly. He and Mikayla Jackson of White Bear Pens currently have the same lathe, which is not that common a choice among makers. When his lathe had some initial problems, Sanchez essentially wrote a manual for the maintenance and repair of it, and shared it with Jackson. Ultimately, they discovered a shared love of “all things sparkly,” and Sanchez shared a table with her at the 2024 San Francisco pen show (with plans to do the same in 2025). The other core Glitterati member is Luke Wiechman from Papa J Woodworks, who consulted Sanchez about the care needed in working with blanks with inclusions and in turn helped him improve his social media presence. “Luke and I discuss florals and glitter for literally hours. Two big dudes having a serious conversation about which shade of pink works well with gold.”

A successful business needs a logo, and Sanchez didn’t think long before choosing an octopus as his mascot. “In my mind, the octopus is the engineer of the sea. They’ll use things that they find as tools to do something with, to camouflage themselves, to get into things. There’s a set of gears in the forehead of my logo to represent the engineering side of this.” Polymer clay artist Toni Street creates the octopus finials he uses in all his pens.

Besides pens and X-ACTO knives, Sanchez also makes bottle stoppers and shaving brushes, and his semi-famous mechanical pencils to provide a pretty outside for Pentel innards. He works almost entirely on commission for all his products, and is booked out about a year. This makes it difficult to accumulate enough inventory to consider doing pen shows. However, he is compensated by the personal relationships that develop during the commission process, which are his favorite thing about what he does. “It's not just fill out this form, send it over and you'll hear from me when the pen’s made; it's, Here's the images of what we could start with, what resonates with you? What's your colors? What do you like? What do you dislike? And then over the time that your pen's being made, I'm sending you photos of, Here's the casting. Here's the casting turned into blocks. The blocks being turned. And every time I do that, there's a conversation along with how the day is going, what you're up to, things of that nature, just organically. There's a lot of people who started off as clients where I don't care if they never order a pen again, but we talk all the time. The last time they ordered a pen, it might have been four years ago and I don't care. It's more about the genuine interest in pens and inks.”

His genuine interest leads to him having a different favorite pen every week. At the moment, his favorite is a “steampunk octopus” pen he just received from Stanford Pen Studio. As far as nibs go, he’s an architect guy. There will soon be a new favorite pen, though, as he is working through the commission process with Urushi Notes.

You can’t talk to two dozen pen makers over the course of two years without hearing multiple times about how Sanchez has helped them engineer a solution to a problem. Besides being a glitter consultant, his engineering and CAD experience led him to design a nib-slitting apparatus for Tim Cullen of Hooligan Georgia, as well as molds for casting motifs in resin for Tailored Pen Company. The process works both ways, as Cullen is now mentoring him in engraving and inspired him to take an engraving class.

Sanchez finds fulfillment in working with a wide variety of people even if they aren’t necessarily working with each other so well. “I was an inner city kid, born and raised in East L.A. The kid next to me in class pulled out a gun and I talked him into putting it away. My nickname in that crowd was ‘Peacekeeper.’ That’s the world I came from and it was not full of kindness. I’m trying to put as much kindness back into the world as I can. You’ve just got to be better, do better work and be the bar that everybody’s trying to beat. You have to be the change you wish to see in the world. Be kind.”

Rob Sanchez’s work can be seen on his Instagram @robspenworks and at the San Francisco Pen Show.

Meet Your Maker: Luke and Kristina Wiechman, Papa J Woodworks

(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.)

Saying “uncle” probably doesn’t mean the same thing to Luke Wiechman as it does to you or me. Uncles figure prominently in his development of woodworking and carpentry skills, and his first pen was a command performance for an uncle.

“I was doing lots of flat work – cutting boards, charcuterie boards – as well as building furniture. When my wife’s uncle showed me a pen he had made out of wood, I wanted to know how he did it.” By way of answer, Uncle Darrell escorted him out to the shop and walked him through making a kit pen. He also gave him a little lathe and some tools and some kits, and sent him home.

However, it all sat for a couple of years – “I made that one awful pen, and then stopped.” But one day when Uncle Darrell happened to be on his mind, Wiechman went back out to the lathe, and was quickly hooked. “There’s something so therapeutic about turning. I can zone out.”

Supporting a kit pen habit became a little expensive, so Wiechman incorporated his business and expanded the kinds of kit items he worked with, to include pizza cutters, crochet hooks, and whatever else comes in a kit. “Flat things weren’t fun anymore.” The one gift lathe has turned into three. The business is named after his father in law, who essentially became his dad as well, until his sudden death in 2020. “Papa J” was heavily involved in supporting people through addiction recovery, and now in his honor Wiechman finds some charity to donate to quarterly from the proceeds of his business.

A chance encounter with Scott Lewis of Tri Star studio in 2023, through a post on Facebook, opened the world of custom pens. Lewis sent him a pen, along with the measurement data showing how it was made. Nic Pasquale and Rob Sanchez were early mentors, and he closely watched Jason Miller’s Craft of Analog videos on Instagram to see in detail all the steps and processes in making a pen. “I wasn’t a big pen user – I didn’t actually use a fountain pen regularly until I made one, but it has become a mainstay. People in the pen community met me where I was at, and I’m learning!” At the moment his favorite pen is a “Ghost” pocket pen from Jacob Pawloski at Mad Science, with a white ghost-shaped cap that glows in the dark.

Looking at Wiechman’s work on his Instagram account, it’s difficult to believe it’s only been a little over a year that he’s been doing this craft – already he’s producing things with a distinctive look. “I was obsessed with this material from Flower Girl Blanks, I used to make bottle stoppers with her stuff. I thought, Wouldn’t it be awesome to do flowers in pens?” A month after starting to make custom pens, he began pouring blanks. This is the point at which Kristina Wiechman became involved in the business in a major way. Although she quickly discovered she is allergic to resin, she has a detailed vision of what she wants to create in a blank, and will choose colors, mix up mica powders, place any additives in piles, and give detailed instructions for achieving the result she has in mind.

Because they both love flowers and gardens, there are dried flowers in many of their materials, and when Luke makes a pen cap he leaves a recess for Kristina to build a finial with flowers. He says that the Venetian glass finials of Hello Tello’s pens were one inspiration for what they are doing with flowers. But inspiration comes from all directions; two recent blanks were cast to match the colors of their cats, and often he spots sneakers or energy drink cans at the gym that strike his fancy. “These companies have already done the hard work of coming up with the color combinations, so I’ll ask someone, ‘Can I take a picture of your shoes?’” He was commissioned to make a pen containing flowers from a wedding bouquet, and would like to do more of that kind of storytelling with pens, as well as making dried flowers from things they grow in their yard.

The floral inclusions in pens and nib holders are going to be getting a bigger canvas. The Wiechmans are working with Nikki Egleton-Volz of Olive Frog Designs to create a proprietary mold for cast pen rests. Some will be made to match pens, others will be used to cast inclusions a little too large to be put into something the size of a pen.

Both of the Wiechmans work in enterprise information technology, and the artistic crafts have definite mental-health value for Luke. “Creating things keeps me centered.” It can also bring lightness into life. “I don’t take myself too seriously as a pen maker – my stuff is more fun and whimsical, whereas artists like Atelier Lusso make things so beautiful they belong in a jewelry store!”

Even aside from the makers who directly mentored him, Luke Wiechman is full of praise for the community of pen makers. “I have been blown away by the support – the pen community as a whole has been so welcoming. The flat-work community was very cutthroat. There is an abundance mindset in the pen maker community, everyone is willing to help you as long as you make your own path. I want people to look at our stuff and say, ‘Papa J made that.’

The Wiechmans’ work can be seen on Instagram @papajww and at Papa J Woodworks. And maybe at the Chicago Pen Show.

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