Playing Catch Up

I've really had my nose to the grindstone these past several months--finishing up commissions, making Christmas presents, caring for sick family members, hosting various pipemakers and aspiring pipemakers, attending to my honey-do list, interviews and photo shoots for P & T, the list goes on. With all that, I've not had much of an opportunity to post to my blog or even my twitter feed. My plan is to spend January updating my website, posting regularly to my blog, and twittering about my ongoing projects in the shop. In the mean time, here's a little update on what I've been doing for the past couple months. Here is a sampling of pieces completed in the latter months of 2009. I hope you enjoy. If you'd like to get regular updates but haven't signed up yet, please feel free to e-mail me. Thanks for a great 2009! Hope you all enjoy the photos.

Todd

This is a little nosewarmer blowfish with boxwood cap and a very thin sliver of mammoth ivory just because. When I was working with Lars one time, I asked him why he had capped a shank face with ivory when it would never be seen. He responded by saying simply, "This is just a way to say 'Lars was here also.'" I've heard it said that one definition of quality is that even the things you can't see are done well.

This is a very special Elephant's foot. Blocks that will give you both the proper grain orientation and a significantly long shank are one in a million. Pipemaking is always a collaborative effort with the raw materials one uses to create.

This is a piece I created while hosting pipemaker Charles Cole. He wanted to see the techniques required to create this effect. This is a beautiful piece of spalted maple, and it must be said that such a stem/shank treatment is necessarily an homage to my good friend, Jody Davis.

Simply put, this is, in my opinion, the best blowfish, and perhaps the best pipe, I've ever made. I shaped this during my interview with P & T magazine about a month ago. The ebonite rod required for the stem was about 3" in diameter!

These are the three smooth Christmas pipes for 2009. The stems are antique bakelite in Jade and Crimson.

This is a magnum Samurai Volcano, the last piece of 2009. I struggled to decide whether to blast this or keep it smooth. The growth rings on this pipe are so prominent that it would have been unreal if blasted. That said, obscuring grain like this would have been criminal.