I Use One Pen

There is something about the feel of a pen in your hand that bolsters the imagination.  When pen hits paper, all manner of ideas, expressions, and beauty can come out... Unless your pen has run dry and all that comes out is circles of dented paper as you scratch furiously across the page to get this final gosh darn word out so you don't have to get up off the couch and walk all the way over to where you keep the pens!  Obviously I'm speaking from experience here...

The last time my pen ran out and I grabbed the cheap plastic replacement off the shelf, I thought that it's too bad I have to throw this old one out.  Then, when this next one runs out of ink, it also goes to landfill.  It would really be better if I could use one pen and refill it: so the research began.

Now, as a designer, there is something you should understand.  The first part of this post about the feel of a pen in one's hand was not an exaggeration.  The pen, for a designer or artist, is an extension of the brain, facilitated by the hand.  Juhani Pallasmaa, in his book called The Thinking Hand:  Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture, displays the active role that the hand (and by extension the pen) takes in the design process.  Basically with experience, the muscles begin to do the work of the designer before the designer has truly thought it through.

Anyway, I'm sure that was more information than you cared to know, so I'll move on.  So what is the most sustainable way to write on paper?  We aren't really sure, and Google isn't telling, but we know that the cheap plastic pen that you get at the bank or hotel isn't it.  There are lots of options available out there.  For us, the most interesting version is a re-fillable pen.  Unfortunately I'm not crazy about fountain pens, but lucky for me, there are rolling ball refillable pens out there.  Some pens have refill inserts that you can buy, but that still has the single use straw.  I searched through all of the pen options and was about to buy a rolling ball with a refillable reservoir, when the lightbulb in my head turned on.  I already had a rolling ball pen with a replaceable cartridge!  It had gone dry years ago, but it was a graduation gift from the RWU librarians, and I had kept it. 

I quickly took it apart and found that the single-use cartridge inside also had a removeable cap.  I did some research, and as it turns out, you can (carefully) drop new fountain pen ink into the reservoir and the pen will start working again.  I found some ink at an office supply store, used an old eyedropper container, and filled it up.  I put too much and got ink on my desk, but I was prepared for that with a mat I made from scrap fabric.

In the end, the pen works perfectly.  I was able to take something that had been sitting around for years and revive it!  I have been using it for months without any problems.  The ink doesn't leak, and the pen writes as well as it always did.  So now, I use one pen and only one pen for 100% of my note taking, thank you card writing, doodling during a boring meeting, and designing.  I do have other art pens that I use for the cards I make for Etsy, but that's why this blog is called Better, Not Perfect.  Over time, I'll figure out ways to make those pens more sustainable, but for now, at least the pen I use the most is better.

PS--from Stephanie: reading this over, I wanted to know why there is a piece of toilet paper in the last photo, not because I'm opposed to the aesthetics of it (although...), but because it's single-use.  Nate claims that he saves it and re-uses it at each filling.  I said there's a better way...

"She dipped her pen into the ink again... She started to write and then stopped and frowned at the pen.  She pulled an orange dahlia penwiper out of her pocket.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'Wiping my pen,' she said.  She stuck the pen into the dahlia and wiped it off between the layers of cloth.  

'It's a penwiper,' I said. 'A pen wiper!  It's used to wipe pens!'

'Yes,' she said, looking at me dubiously. 'There was ink on the point.  It would have blotted the paper.'

'Of course!  So you wipe it on a penwiper!...  You've solved a mystery that's been plaguing me since 1940" (Willis 311).

Willis, Connie. To Say Nothing of the Dog. Bantam Books/Spectra, 1998. 

Look for a future post showing off the orange dahlia penwiper I'll crochet from some orange yarn I have leftover from a previous project.  Also, if you've never read Connie Willis, let me take this as an opportunity to highly recommend her novels.  (The novellas and short stories are more of a mixed bag.)