"Smaug the Briar" | Hand-carved briar pipe

Smaug the Briar!

Ah, pull up a chair... for this tale of fire and briar! Once upon a podcast, @mattfradd stirred up childhood memories evoking grand gatherings where tobacco pipes were as common as the tales told. No smoke does I puff, yet the scent of tobacco lingered like a spell from childhood.

Enter stage left: a humble Bones pipe from @morganpipes, not much to look at, but oh, the potential! It was less a pipe and more a canvas. Then, as if from the pages of Tolkien's tomes (a nod to the old pipe-smoking professor himself), a spark ignited and inspiration took wing.  Smaug, that magnificent dragon of lore, would be my muse.

With tools more suited to a hobbit's workshop than an elves magical forge—a rotary tool here, an X-Acto blade there—I embarked on my maiden voyage into the realms of wood carving.  I carved each scale with the care of a dwarf crafting in the halls of Erebor, the briar wood yielding to my vision.

A dash of rustic stain to give life to the scales, and a wax seal, not unlike a magic rune, to guard this treasure against time's ravages. Thus, Smaug the Briar was born, not in the fires of Mount Doom, but from the warmth of memory and the spark of creativity. Here's to unexpected adventures in craftsmanship, where every pipe tells a story, and every whiff of tobacco is a journey through time! Cheers!