Slow Down: Cliches at Work

I like to push myself. I enjoy trying new things in my shop and seeing what works. Sometimes I’m surprised that a particular idea worked, other times I’m surprised it didn’t. But trying new ideas is vital to growing as an artist.

For the past week I’ve been working on a new idea. It’s big. It’s so big that it actually has me wondering if it’s too big. Is there such a thing? Can you actually have an idea that is too big, or is it that we are just too afraid to fail? Part of me hates the idea of failing simply because that means either my idea wasn’t good enough or I simply couldn’t execute it properly. But another part of me is afraid to fail because of the monetary investment this particular idea will take.

We all know the cliches – You reap what you sow. Go big or go home. Balls out (which actually has nothing to do with male genitalia). Despite my concerns, my fears, I’m going to do exactly that. I’m going to grab the bull by the horns.

I would rather fail and know I tried my best than never try and wonder “What if?”

Greco Woodcrafting at Riverwinds

Having your own website is interesting. Of course there’s the obvious, you get to display and sell your products or services, but there’s more to it than that. There’s also the spam you receive from people promising to increase your Google rankings, or other such nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, increasing my search ranking is important, but I’m not going to hire a random spammer.

But you also get some good contacts. Just today I received a message from somebody asking me to call them, so I took the chance that it wasn’t related to more search engine optimization and gave the gentleman a call. I am gad I did!

As it turns out, I was invited by the Woodbury Rotary Club to be a guest speaker for their February 28th meeting at the Riverwinds restaurant in Deptford, NJ. I’ll be talking about my pens and will bring along some tools of the trade along with pens in various states of finish. I will also have a select group of my finished products on-hand showing some of what I have available for purchase. I’m expecting a good Q&A session, I just hope I don’t go over the allotted time!

My thanks to the Woodbury Rotary club, I’m looking forward to a great afternoon

January is Rough

I’m not a big fan of January.

It has a lot of great things, don’t get me wrong. Of course there’s the start of a new year, my daughter’s birthday and getting to do indoor activities together as a family. But creatively speaking, I really don’t like it.

There’s the cleanup from the Holidays, the planning of said daughter’s birthday party, filing Q4 sales tax from the previous year, getting my ducks in a row to file our taxes (which means taking inventory) and the general hustle and bustle of getting the kids back into their school routine after having a week off. That usually leaves me feeling the urge to get back into my workshop. Badly.

Cold weather doesn’t help. The shop takes a good couple of hours before it heats up to a comfortable working temperature, but it’s getting out there to begin with that is really the hard part this time of year. Meanwhile, my head is buzzing with new ideas.

The good news in all of this is that yes, my head really is buzzing with new ideas. I have some cool new high end pen designs that I think will make you do a double take. I don’t want to give it away, but I’ll tell you it involves more than simply turning a piece of wood into a pen (although there isn’t really anything simple about doing that well). And of course I can’t wait to get started on my new line of acrylic pens. I’ve looked through each piece of acrylic and inspected all of the hardware, these are really going to be great introductory pens.

So if you’re waiting for new content on my website, don’t fret. It’s in the works, it’s just that January is rough.

Do You Get the Picture?

As many of you know, I’ve been working diligently to improve the quality of my pictures. I knew the photos I was taking of my pens were nowhere near as good as the pens themselves, so I really tried to push my little point and shoot to its limits. Eventually I had to accept defeat, and Santa left me a nice new DSLR under the tree (a Canon EOS Rebel T3).

Of course my first thought was that I was now ready to have excellent photos. Well, I was ready to have them, but I wasn’t ready to take them. Some toying around, some very helpful tips from ever kind friends, and finally I was starting to see the beginnings of a decent picture. From here I was now off to learn more about the post production process, making the colors true and vibrant with great clarity and sharpness. I had been fiddling around with GIMP, a free download similar to Photoshop, with OK results. But then the other night everything changed.

A friend of mine had me remote in to his desktop to watch him edit some of my pen pictures in Photoshop. He explained why he was doing each of the steps and was patient with my silly questions. After, I downloaded the Photoshop trial and started working on some of the new pictures I took. What a difference! I’m going to show a couple of them here, along with a ‘Before’ pic, where the picture was taken on my old point and shoot, and an ‘After’, showing the same pen photographed with the new camera and edited in Photoshop. Hopefully this side-by-side display will help you understand the level of frustration I had over my old camera.

Picture of an acrylic pen taken on my old camera.

Same pen, photographed with the new camera, edited in Photoshop

Fumed curly Oak pen, old camera.

Same pen, new camera.

I still have a lot of pens to re-shoot, and even the Oak one you see above needs some more shots (the other side has amazing detail that really needs to be displayed in the listing on my website). But I am really more than happy with the results and think finally, my pictures truly are doing my work justice

Brown Bagging It

Chances are, if you talk to 5 different wood workers and ask them how they dry freshly cut wood, you will get 5 different answers. Although there is a science behind the methods, I doubt very few of us fully understand….myself included. I know for my method it has to do with the wood reaching a balanced humidity level. I also know there are specific terms related to the wood being as dry as it will get in that controlled environment. But more importantly, I know what works for me and so that’s what I do.

I have a some spalted Horse Chestnut cut into blanks that are currently being prepped for drying. I have a bunch of them (about 30) sitting on my front step. Just inside my front door I have a table set up with a roll of brown craft paper. I bring the blanks in, a few at a time, and basically wrap them like a Christmas present. The only real difference is taping the flaps down isn’t good enough. I need to -seal- the wood in there, so any spots where the paper overlaps has to be taped, running the length of every seam.

Brown paper bags will work too, by the way. I used as many as I had on hand, but so few places use those for bagging anymore.

Once the blanks are wrapped they are stored in my workshop in a way that allows air to circulate around the entire piece. The wood will dry, but much more slowly than if it was being exposed directly to the air. The bag helps slow things down and reduces the risk of the wood developing cracks, which happens easily with Horse Chestnut.

The wood, which I expect will dry rather fast, should be ready by late Spring. I just wonder, when I make something from it and somebody asks me how long it took to make, do I tell them 5 months?

JerseyMan Magazine Interview

As some of you already know, I was interviewed for the December issue of JerseyMan Magazine. It was a great article that I felt really explained who I am and what I do to the average reader.

I’m very happy to announce that the interview is now available on their website! If you haven’t already, head on over and read my interview. Or if you just want to do some window shopping, take a look through my website featuring my handcrafted pens and other goodies

Not Your Typical Clickable

In my last blog entry I touched on the notion of modifying the metal pen hardware I use for some new pens. You might be wondering exactly what that means, and luckily you have me here to explain it!

Before you can understand how modifications work, you need to understand how pens are made. For a pen maker like myself, I purchase the metal components from a pen supply house, then select and shape wood or acrylic to fit the appropriate pen hardware and ‘assemble’ it. So what is the pen hardware?

It may vary slightly from one pen style to another, but your typical pen has a top half and a bottom half. Those 2 halves are separated by a metal center band which typically matches both the metal tip and metal endcap/clip of the pen. In addition there is the mechanism that extends and retracts the ink cartridge tip. And last, but most importantly, are the 2 metal tubes that the top and bottom halves of the wood are actually attached to.

Now that you know what the parts are, we need to understand how they work together. We’ll take a simple click pen. Starting at the bottom you have the metal tip, followed by the bottom half of the wood, a metal center band, the upper half of the wood, and lastly the plunger (aka ‘Clicker’ or, the more technical term, ‘Thingamajig’). The 2 pieces of wood need to be a VERY specific size, both in length and diameter. If it is too thick it simply won’t fit onto the pen hardware. And if it is either too long or too short, the writing tip will either always be exposed or never fully extend.

So altering a pen, like I’ve done here, can be tricky. Mostly because you need to make the length of the pen -exactly the same- as if it had been left unchanged. Although there is no center band, the distance between the tip and the Thingamajig is dead-on. The end result is a beautiful modified pen that truly showcases the material used with no aesthetic interruptions.

Hand crafted Boxelder Burl on modified click pen hardware by Greco Woodcrafting

This was the first pen I modified from a 2 piece (top and bottom) design to a 1 piece design. I really enjoyed making it and am extremely pleased with the end result. I hope you are, too!

It’s 2012. Now? Let’s Rock!

2011 was a pretty great year for Greco Woodcrafting. I was able to find that yes, there is life after the CPSIA. For me it wasn’t in making wooden toys, as I had started back in April 2008, but rather fine hand crafted pens. I’ve always loved pens, so making them really became one of those “Why didn’t I do this sooner?” moments. I was able to get some good press coverage and was fortunate enough to be asked to make items for the Philadelphia Independence Seaport Museum. I was even able to make donations through my corporate partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation to have 25 trees plated through the course of the year.

But now it’s 2012. A clean slate. As good as 2011 was, I intend for 2012 to be even better!

For starters, you may have noticed a new look here on my blog. The new banner is the same as the new banner on  my website. I figure since pens are hands-down what my main focus is and will remain, I should probably be a bit more specific with the banner. The overall blog change is representative of my intention to fully revive my blog. Yes, for a while I posted nearly daily. Can you imagine that? I’m not promising to be able to reach that level of blogginess (yes, I made that up), but I guarantee there will be many more posts throughout the year.

But 2012 will have more in store than just writing blog entries. I have already began planning and acquiring materials for an entry level pen series. Not everybody has the money for some of my higher end pens, and others just don’t understand why anybody would ever pay that much for a pen (“It’s just a pen!” as one shopper said to me last year at a craft fair). This new line of pens will at first be strictly acrylics with slimline twist style hardware and will cost just $20. The design will be more simple than some of my other acrylic pens, but I will still give them every bit as much attention as I do to any of my other pens. Though I don’t think larger pen kit styles will find their way into this series, I won’t count them out altogether.

In addition to the new pen series will be the addition of bottle stoppers. Well, I should say more bottle stoppers. I started making these in mid-December 2011 and was really very happy with the response. The bottle stoppers are all made with solid stainless steel stoppers. What’s the difference between stainless steel stoppers and ones that are chrome plated? Acids in the wine can cause the chrome plating to corrode and essentially disintegrate into your wine. I refuse to skimp on materials to make a few extra dollars. You can keep an eye on the bottle stopper progress through my website featuring all of my hand crafted bottle stoppers.

Hand crafted bottle stopper by Greco Woodcrafting

And of course, there will be more pen styles to choose from. Everything from high end collector-grade hardware to unique pieces of wood. I will be experimenting with modifying the pen hardware in some cases, and may even go so far as to try making my own acrylics.

While thinking of the things I want to accomplish in 2012 for my business, I kept looking at specific things I planned on doing. But less specific, and more important, is that I continue to put everything I have, heart and soul, into everything I make. So 2011 is over. It’s 2012. Let’s rock!

Photo Tweaks & Updates

It seems like it’s been forever since I posted a blog entry, but things have certainly been busy and the time has really been flying by! Some news to get you caught up:

I was honored to be contacted by St. Peter’s church of Philadelphia for some commissioned work. The church, a 250 year old national historic landmark built on land donated by William Penn’s sons, has an OLD Horse Chestnut tree that had to come down. Wanting to preserve the memory of this historic tree, I was asked to take some of the tree to turn it into items the parishioners would be able to have as keepsakes.

Horse Chestnut tree in St. Peter's of Philadelphia

So far I have well over 20 custom pieces that the parish has ordered, but I have enough wood to make much more than that. I expect to have some pieces available for general purchase through my site at www.GrecoWoodcrafting.com sometime in the Summer or Fall of 2012.

I was fortunate this year to find a shiny new camera under the Christmas tree (well, a couple of weeks before Christmas, but it really was under the tree!). It’s a DSLR and, as mentioned in the past, I am set on taking more accurate photos of my work. Here is a recently updated pen photo showing a rollerball pen made from Pink Ivory.

Pink Ivory Rollerball pen available through Greco Woodcrafting

Keep an eye on my site as I continue to update the pictures of all of my handcrafted fine writing instruments. I hope you and yours have a Very Happy New Year!

Click Without the ‘Click’

Handmade chrome click gel pen with blue and black acrylic body by Greco Woodcrafting

Since I started making pens I’ve gotten all sorts of very specific requests. From the color of ink available to the kind of case the pen comes with. And though I do my best to offer options in these areas, there was 1 recurring request that I hadn’t had a single choice: click pens.

Well, until now.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I wasn’t trying to make one. In fact, I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at different click pen hardware kits, reading reviews and talking to owners. When I make a pen everything about it reflects upon my name, whether I made that particular part or not. That’s why finding just the right click pen was so important to me.

I am Very happy to report that the search is over! Pictured here you see the first handmade click pen I am offering. It is a cigar pen with chrome click hardware and a black gel cartridge. The body of the pen is a beautiful blue and black acrylic that has deep white pearl tones swirling throughout, playing up to the chrome and black enamel on the hardware.

The click mechanism is super smooth and almost effortless, but when you click it there is really no audible ‘click’ sound. Which makes me wonder, can you still call it a ‘click pen’? Maybe ‘thumb operated retractable writing tip pen’ would be better? Or perhaps this is a ‘plunger style writing instrument’?

Whatever title you want to give it, I’m sure the lucky person who gets this will simply call it a ‘joy’.