Tine Balleby: Smooth Sphinx with Bamboo Tobacco Pipe

Smokingpipes began hosting the American Pipe Making Expo in 2015, soliciting submissions from North America's premier carvers and affording them the opportunity to showcase their most inventive and creative work. For 2024, to celebrate the Expo's 10th anniversary, we've expanded our scope to accommodate carvers from all over the world, turning the American Pipe Making Expo into the Global Pipe Making Expo. Like in years past, the 2024 Expo revolves around a core theme, and appropriately, given the event's birthday, we've returned to our very first Expo's theme: bamboo.

As one might expect for someone who grew up around pipe making, Tine Balleby has an innate understanding of what makes a pipe both beautiful and functional. She tends to craft more traditional designs, making this Sphinx an impressive outlier within her greater portfolio — but a welcome and immediately charming outlier. Like the Elephant's Foot and the Ballerina, the Sphinx is a Bo Nordh shape that's since become a part of the greater pipe-making lexicon, though it's not rendered as often as the previously mentioned designs. Balleby has beautifully captured the shape's telltale features, including the bowl's bulbous fore wall and a wrapping ridgeline that bifurcates the bowl's fore and aft. Said ridgline frames a gorgeous showing of cross grain at the head of the pipe and a see of birdseye across the back of the bowl. A wide transition marks the start of an upturned shank that sweeps upward before giving way to four knuckles of warm bamboo, with the dense grass adding a touch of vibrant color to the shape's otherwise muted palette.