Manduela: Bamboo Acorn with Bamboo and Meerschaum 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.

While Manduela Riger-Kusk is most commonly associated with angular designs, her portfolio is full of compositions both traditional and avant garde, with this Acorn being a example of the latter. Evoking the texture and visual character of a corn cob pipe, this piece boasts a tobacco chamber inset to natural bamboo, with dozens of circular nodes covering the walls. This unique, rustic aesthetic is continued through the pipe's aft, where a shank made entirely of more traditional bamboo extends outward before giving way to a trim tapered stem. Though she could have settled for showcasing her expertise in two different materials, Manduela has also lined the tobacco chamber with meerschaum, allowing for this piece to smoke with a neutral flavor.