Sabina Santos: Natural Smooth Calabash with Bamboo, Mammoth, and Pearls (G) Tobacco Pipe

Since 2015, Smokingpipes has hosted the American Pipe-Making Exposition, celebrating the ingenuity and talent of artisan carvers across the United States. However, in 2024 the Exposition expanded to include all pipe makers around the world — the Global Pipe-Making Exposition, the first of its kind. Though broadened in participation, the Expo's format remained consistent with previous years: Artisans designed and fashioned pipes centered on a singular theme, distinct to each year, expressing the motif according to their own creative visions. For the first Global Pipe-Making Exposition, we returned to the Expo's very first theme: bamboo.

Over the course of her illustrious career as an artisan pipe maker, Sabina Santos has fashioned a number of Calabashes, but this one elevates her work to a new level. It's a showcase of remarkable craftsmanship combined with beautiful briar and exquisite accents. Most evident is the mammoth rim cap, which Santos hand-shaped to a subtle teardrop outline to match her shaping of the briar. A briar insert in the cap provides a standard smoking experience, and when removed, the exposed briar reveals a rich contrast stain — an unnecessary detail, but one that bespeaks Santos' meticulous approach and eye for detail. For an air-tight construction, the cap is pressure-fitted to the briar via a hand-shaped cork compression ring, which Santos sourced locally from her native Portugal. Dressed in a smooth, blonde finish, the briar stummel resembles the curved nature and color of traditional gourd Calabashes, but the shank is extended by two knuckles of bamboo in line with the Expo's theme. Embellishing the bamboo further, though, Santos decorated some of the nodes with genuine pearls for an elevated and regal aesthetic. Lastly, a mammoth shank cap echoes the rim for aesthetic consistency and added visual intrigue before transitioning into a lithely bent stem of hand-cut vulcanite. It's yet another phenomenal Calabash within Santos' already impressive portfolio, and it's only fitting that it received her G grade, representing her best work.