My 'Beautiful Pen' Pen

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JohnGreco

JohnGreco

Member
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
740
Location
Sewell, NJ 08080
I want to start by saying when I entered this in the advanced beautiful pen contest I knew there would be a lot of technically crafted pens. This is a much more straight-forward pen; I was really banking on the uniqueness of the materials as a driving factor but alas that wasn't even enough to get me into the finals lol.

I stabilized the wood with cactus juice and gave it a CA finish. One of the knots has a hole in the very center that wasn't visible until I turned it down and saw the shine of the brass...so I filled that in with some ebony sawdust.

The hardware is silver (courtesy of Mike's silverpenparts). The wood is Black Walnut from Elmira Prison, aka "Hellmira". This was a Union side Civil War POW camp in Elmira, NY. These particular boards came from where the Confederate officers were held.

Hellmira was deplorable, with many historians today claiming it was meant to be a death camp instead of a prison. It was severely inadequately able to house and care for the prisoners. With over 10,000 prisoners going through there, there was approximately a 25% mortality rate.

That's about all, maybe next year I'll have a more suitable pen for that category. It's fantastic seeing what people come up with for it :) Thanks for looking.
 

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You are right it is straight forward and very elegant. I banked on the same thing in the intermediate contest and also didn't make the final but it was my first time to try in a contest here. I will know better next year and come out with something much more technical. Great pen that you made.
 
Cool pen, timber and story. And your right, pretty hard to compete with a straight-up piece of wood pen against the crowd that was in this years group. Be interesting to see what you do for next years!!!




Scott (sorta looks like mango) B
 
Hi John,

I like it! The wood and those beautiful components look so good together! I also really like the bullet prop! The history in the pen does make it quite unique - 150+ years old and from a prison camp. Pretty cool! Thank you for posting about your entry!!

Greg
 
I've been wanting to try one of these silver kits.
How are they to work with?
 
You don't need to win a contest, that pen is a winner on it's own. What a great way to take a foul situation and turn it into something beautiful...
 
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