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Valhalla’s Things: A Pen Case (or a Few)

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Valhalla’s Things: A Pen Case (or a Few)
Posted on March 2, 2026

Tags: madeof:atoms, FreeSoftWear, craft:sewing

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? 😀

  1. 16€. plus a 9€ converter, and another 6€ pen to get the
    EF nib from, since it wasn’t available for the expensive pen.↩︎

  2. I have them written down somewhere. I couldn’t find
    them. So I measured the real thing, with some approximation.↩︎