(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.
