Scott Klein: Bamboo Calabash (Signature) 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.

Drawing on his affinity for woodworking and his love for Danish and Japanese pipe making, Scott Klein crafts evocative, expressive designs that are more often than not highly organic in appearance. That proclivity for organicism is dialed to 11 with this Calabash, being made entirely of bamboo, save for the chamber and airway, which are briar. An incredibly long composition, this piece boasts an arcing, Horn-like curvature, with the thick, tubular bamboo of the stummel gradually expanding as it approaches the removable Calabash rim. The precise, symmetrical spacing of the bamboo further emphasizes the aforementioned curvature and flare, each knuckle acting as a visual focal point for the eye and adding legibility to the shape's profile. Klein has capped this piece with a bold saddle stem that continues the implied line of the stummel and whose shoulders mimic a missing node of bamboo.