I need a way to store more information than just the seed words. For each wallet, I figure I might need upwards of 1000 characters. Possibly I'd like to store multiple wallets all at once. So looking at maybe 5000 to 10000 characters. 10 kb. I need to be able to print out an encrypted image on a piece of paper. That would be my cold storage. When I'm ready to redeem, I will scan the image back in and decrypt its contents. And recover the original text file containing all my important seed phrases. I think this would be more secure than putting it on a flash drive since paper can last longer. Hundreds of years. then only problem is that you can't really use qrcodes for that. they would literally be huge.
You can encrypt the wallet with AES256, encode the wallet in BASE64 using some easy-to-parse computer font such as Courier New or System (they must be monospaced), and then print out the characters onto a large number of sheets of paper. Then you save the AES key and IV as qrcodes. Store all materials in a confidential place such as inside a safe.
When you want to access the file again, read the papers in with a scanner, strip all whitespace and then decode the AES256 with the key and IV you have independently scanned. Requires a lot of paper, but it works.
Or lobby the Electrum folks with a feature proposal to export wallet data to JSON so you have less data to print and scan.