Sabina Santos (Sabina Pipes)

Sabina Santos is a Portuguese handmade pipe maker who signs her pipes "Sabina." She is recorded as having been born on 20 May 1985 in Tiel, the Netherlands, and has lived in Portugal since the age of three. Working in a craft where women makers are few has contributed to her name becoming known early on.

Coming to the Craft

Santos trained in communications and spent the first years of her working life in finance. She has said herself that she turned to woodworking in search of balance against a desk job; according to the record, this search dates to around 2013. Her husband, a longtime pipe smoker, had a keen interest in the handmade pipe world, and this drew her into the same field. Santos left her job after the birth of her son, and carved her first pipe during this period.

For the following three years she taught herself, learning through trial and error on every pipe. Once she saw the limits of working alone, she traveled to Denmark for training and spent seven weeks there. Fellow Portuguese maker João Reis became her guide there; during this period she also gathered knowledge at the bench from masters such as Tom Eltang, Kai Nielsen, Kurt Balleby and Tao Nielsen. It is said that in her work in Denmark she focused especially on surface treatments, bamboo-shanked bodies and drilling geometry.

Sense of Shape

Santos's designs sit distinctly within the Danish school line. By her own account, her sources of inspiration include Scandinavian masters such as the Ivarsson family, Bo Nordh, Poul Ilsted and Jess Chonowitsch. She is known to prefer taking classic shapes as a base and giving them a contemporary reading.

The maker's own emphasis is that aesthetics do not come before engineering: drilling accuracy and internal geometry matter as much as the body's proportions. She uses Italian and Algerian briar as her main material; stems are hand-worked from German ebonite. For decoration and transition rings she uses bamboo, horn, exotic woods, and treated mammoth ivory and bone. She is also recorded as having experimented with material recovered from recycled plastic bottles for ornamentation.

Stamps

All pipes carry the "Sabina" stamp. On some of these, a single additional letter "G" stamp also appears; the maker applies this mark only to the examples she considers, by her own standards, the most successful, and the letter refers to the name of her son Gil. The "G" is thus not the name of a series or a surface treatment, but an internal grading mark the maker applies to herself. Because the workshop is small in scale, annual production is limited and each piece is finished individually by hand; as a result, no two pipes are expected to be identical.

Recognition

Santos's name has become known at international gatherings such as the Chicago and Chengde pipe shows, and she has also been a guest on the radio program hosted by Brian Levine.