Jared Coles: Smooth Acorn with Bamboo (1929) Tobacco Pipe

The theme for 2019's American Pipemaking Exposition is, once again, bamboo — returning to the motif that started it all back in 2015 but now featuring more carvers and more innovative approaches, as bamboo has become all the more popular within pipe making since Smokingpipes.com's inaugural project. That said, the theme remains fairly open-ended, allowing artisans to stoke their creative forges, so to speak, hindered by as few restraints as possible — the only requirement being that bamboo must be implemented somehow in the compositions.

For Jared Coles, though, simply incorporating any ol' piece of bamboo into his entry wouldn't suffice. No, he had to go and grow the organic stuff himself and use his own bamboo. Planted in 2014 on Jared's property in central California, the bamboo used here was harvested a year ago and has cured since, waiting for a time such as this. It's featured here in a Dublin-esque Acorn design that calls to mind Sixten Ivarsson's famous shape — a fitting homage as Sixten was the first to approach bamboo from a compositional perspective, rather than purely as a functional means of saving briar during scarcities.

The flared bowl rises from above a rounded, protruding heel underneath thanks to the high-set transition. Said heel spur continues the rhythm of the bamboo knuckles, as does the saddle stem, tying the piece together as a whole. Furthermore, Jared has separated the stem from the bamboo extension with a creamy white spacer, then sealed the bamboo nodes with black-and-white-dotted epoxy, echoing the color palette of the vulcanite stem and bright spacer. Lastly, Coles' homegrown bamboo is paired with briar that showcases perhaps the most stunning orientation of cross grain I've ever come across: The horizontal grain is crisply stacked and well-centered, and the seas of birdseye dominating the flanks are, in a word, captivating.