Scottie Piersel: Relief Contrast Autumn Acorn with Morta 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.

Scottie Piersel boasts one of the most immediately recognizable design styles in all of North America. While Piersel crafts a variety of classic forms, it's her unique, pencil-shanked designs that most often appear in her portfolio, and it's self-evident why: they are, like all of her pipes, meticulously engineered and visually striking, playing with both proportion and expectation. This Acorn boasts Piersel's signature silhouette: a plump, full-bodied bowl seemingly suspended at the fore an incredibly trim shank-and-stem arrangement. One could be forgiven for, at first glance, thinking this piece is haphazardly produced, and that is perhaps Piersel's greatest trick — in reality, rock-solid engineering underpins the entire composition. Piersel accomplishes the playful visual disparity between bowl and shank by lining each of her pencil shanks with stainless steel, ensuring the composition's durability despite the shank's slender dimensions. This Acorn takes her signature aesthetic a step further by adding a shank extension of morta that's been painstakingly carved to resemble bamboo, the petrified bog oak's inky complexion replicating the look of darker bamboo. She's then capped the morta with a vibrant stem of multicolored vulcanite that adds an autumnal aesthetic and stands out sharply against the rest of the pipe's otherwise subdued palette.