Teen Wood Carver Crafts Custom Pens Into Successful Business

It is not every twelve-year-old girl who asks her parents for a wood-carving lathe for her birthday. But, five years ago, that’s exactly what Kate Diamond did.

Now 17, the Ramsey High School senior has spent the past 18 months as an entrepreneur, turning her hobby of creating custom, handmade pens into a small business called Dragon Sigma Designs.

Kate started turning wood in 2007, after seeing it be done at a wood working convention she attended with her dad. She asked her parents for equipment to start making pens for her birthday that year.

According to her parents, crafting was one of the methods they tried to improve her fine motor skills. Kate was born with Neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder causing usually benign tumors to grow on nerves.

Likely as a result of her NF, Kate suffers from dysgraphia, which affects her ability to work with her hands.

“We thought wood carving might help with that,” her mom Justine, who also has NF, said.

What her parents didn’t realize was that Kate would take the idea, and run with it.

After a few years of perfecting her craft, Kate formed Dragon Sigma Designs, a company that allowed her to do wood turning demonstrations and sell her pens at craft fairs, farmers markets, and online. Since then, the teenager has created five successful custom pen lines – the larger cigar and European style lines, a slim line, mini click pen line, and even a combo pen and stylis line, used on iPads and other touch-screen devices.

It takes Kate between 30 minutes and an hour to create each pen, depending on the design. She can turn the pens out of one block of raw material, called a blank. Or, she can fuse several different blank pieces together to created striped or multicolor pattern on pens.

At craft shows, her collection of pens cost $25 - $35 each. The extra $5 she charges for the multicolor pens is donated to The Children's Tumor Foundation, which supports research and treatment of NF. So far, she has donated almost $1,000 to the cause. "I'm very proud of that," she said.

Most recently, Kate launched a custom collegiate pen line, creating college-color pens to-order.

Of being a teen entrepreneur, Kate says “it’s a little hectic. But I enjoy what I’m doing.”

This Sunday, Kate will be one of the featured vendors at the Ramsey Farmers Market. Stop by to see a collection of her hand-crafted pens, and a demonstration of how she makes them.

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