Valhalla's Things — A Pen Case (or a Few)

A pen case made of two pieces of a relatively stiff black material
with a flat base and three separate channels on top, plus a flap
covering everything and a band to keep the flap closed; there is
visible light blue stitching all around the channels.

For my birthday, I’ve bought myself a fancy new expensive¹ fountain pen.

A two slot pen case in the same material as above, but brown:
the flap is too short to cover the pens, and there isn't a band to
keep it closed.

Such a fancy pen, of course requires a suitable case: I couldn’t use the failed prototype of a case I’ve been keeping my Preppys in, so I had to get out the nice vegetable tanned leather… Yeah, nope, I don’t have that (yet). I got out the latex and cardboard material that is sold as a (cheaper) leather substitute, doesn’t look like leather at all, but is quite nice (and easy) to work with. The project is not vegan anyway, because I used waxed linen thread, waxing it myself with a lot of very nicely smelling beeswax.

a case similar to the one above, but this one only has two
slots, and there is a a Faber Castell pen nested on top of the
case between the two slots.
Here the stitches are white, and in a coarser thread.

I got the measurements² from the less failed prototype where I keep my desktop pens, and this time I made a proper pattern I could share online, under the usual Free Culture license.

A case like the one above, except that the stitches are in
black, and not as regular. This one has also been scrunched up a
bit for a different look, and now the band is a bit too wide.

From the width of the material I could conveniently cut two cases, so that’s what I did, started sewing the first one, realized that I got the order of stitching wrong, and also that if I used light blue thread instead of the black one it would look nice, and be easier to see in the pictures for the published pattern, started sewing the second one, and kept alternating between the two, depending on the availability of light for taking pictures.

The open pen case, showing two pens, a blue Preppy and a
gunmetal Plaisir cosily nested in the two outer slots, while the
middle slot is ominously empty.

One of the two took the place of my desktop one, where I had one more pen than slots, and one of the old prototypes was moved to keep my bedside pen, and the other new case was used for the new pen in my handbag, together with a Preppy, and now I have a free slot and you can see how this is going to go wrong, right? :D

16€. plus a 9€ converter, and another 6€ pen to get the EF nib from, since it wasn’t available for the expensive pen.↩︎
I have them written down somewhere. I couldn’t find them. So I measured the real thing, with some approximation.↩︎