Everything reminds me of him.

You’ll never look at a beetroot the same way ever again.

Veggie-Table Lamps

As The Great Pottery Throwdown enters its Monkey Tennis Era, kicking off Waitrose Own-brand Homewares Week was the task of creating a Sculpted Realistic Vegetable Lamp Base

it’s certainly a riff on the previous Sculpted Realistic Animal Lamp Bases from a few series ago as the Throwdown becomes an ouroboros of clay and consumes itself. Sadly I’m not sure a single vegetable in this world could ever live up to Jenny’s Anglerfish Lamp

Their vegetables could be built using any hand-building method and would go through a single firing process – skipping the bisque firing meaning they applied their glazes to the raw clay after they dried their pieces to a leather hardness in the drying room.

This challenge was of course devised almost entirely because they wanted someone to inevitably make something that looked a bit rude because vegetables tend to be quite… penis-y, just ask Samantha Mumba

thoroughly recommend giving yourself an afternoon to fall down the rabbit hole of controversy that is the Irish Eurovision selection process. A mess.

And I imagine production was a little bit disappointed when nobody walked into the pottery with plans of making a giant courgette. But Ariadne, courgettes are botanically considered fru-

But just as all hope seemed lost, Natalie’s plan for a Motivational Beetroot Lamp

went from “Hang In there, baby!” to “Hung down there, baby!”

very swiftly the large Mesopotamian Fertility Symbol became the main character of the show as Siobhan used any opportunity to take a photo opportunity with it like someone too shy to do the Leaning Tower of Pisa pose

The Tower of Pisa’s not the only thing that leans a little to the right…

Now, if you’d told me to guess which vegetable would get doubled up on, I would have guessed the humble potato – easy, reliable and just kind of neat

and yet, nobody opted to just make a giant lump for their lamp-

we’ll get to you… But somehow the rivalry of the episode was between Natalie and Diana being locked in a Beet Off

well, Diana says “pile of beetroots” I say “gibbering mouther”

which Princess unexpectedly came face-to-face with when she opened the drying room and recoiled in fright upon setting eyes on the neutrally aligned medium aberration

that’s a surprise round, we’ll roll for initiative in a moment.

So with Natalie trying to out beet Diana, Steve was left to his own devices in the corner

his vegetable of choice being a Globe Artichoke because he loves globe artichokes and not because it’s one of the first results on Google Images when you search for “sculpted vegetable lamp bases”. Sorry, that’s “one of the first non-AI generated results on Google Images when you search for ‘Sculpted Vegetable Lamp Bases'” – the internet is dead

it is a clever choice though because the way the light plays down on the layered leaves looks very dramatic which I’m sure is also why James chose to make a very similarly shaped tower of Oyster Mushrooms

and James wasn’t the only one screaming “IT’S NUTRITIONALLY CONSIDERED A VEGETABLE!” into the void as Jonathan came brandishing a portrait of a Cauliflower Mushroom like Chad Kroeger

colour printing? Someone’s got money to burn!

This did mean he mostly spent the first half of the challenge kind of just creating a giant lump because the caulieflowerification would take place in the refinement stage but then, for some reason, he decided to take the former out and very quickly the over-sized potato became a medium-sized potato as it went white dwarf and rapidly gave in to gravitational collapse

and there was no better showcase of disparity of how things were going as Jonathan desperately tried to reshape the mushroom that longed for the sweet release of death than the cut between him having a miserable time and Natalie offering condolences while hugging her giant beetroot fallus

but Jonathan wasn’t the only one emotionally checking out by the end of the initial sculpting phase by the halfway point of slab-building a giant corn cob Francesca had the blank stare of a woman on the edge

quite possibly because she’d heard tell of the fact one of the Judges’ Chat examples was a corn cob lamp

in an episode full of lamps that I don’t think anyone could actually have in their home, I think the half-eaten Corn on the Cob that seemed like a good idea when you were making your Nando’s order but was ultimately very disappointing and you should have gone for the spicy rice maybe takes the cake. It’s the bite mark, it’s just…upsetting to me. My favourite example lamp though was this pumpkin which I don’t believe is actually a lamp, I think they just balanced a lampshade on a ceramic pumpkin

I have seen those exact ornaments in every yuppy gift shop trying to insist that Halloween can be tasteful. It can’t.

Francesca’s lamp was at least a whole fresh cob which she was making by sprig moulding her kernels onto the final piece

this entire challenge was just Francesca trying to ignore the monkey of howling inevitability on her back.

Lastly we have Imy who was going for an ambitiously vertical pod of peas

the main problem being that she had to find a way of connecting the botanically correct “pea foot” to the mains structure without jeopardising the build

although to her, the bigger problem was this harbinger of doom

I hate it when my model turns up two weeks late for Realistically Sculpted Raku Insect Week.

Gazing Into The Void

For this week’s Throwdown Challenge, the potters were having to make a double-walled thermal bowl. And if you’re wondering how a thermal bowl works, Rich has you covered

I could never have guessed.

Most thermal bowls tends to be made out of some sort of steel or plastic and for good reason – can you IMAGINE having to lug your 5kg soup bowl from the kitchen to the living room? You’ve turned 45 minutes of tutting at the decision making on Bargain Hunt during your lunch break into a full on work out!

it was less of a soup bowl and more of an introductory basin being used to suss out who might need to be chopped before we hit Bathroom Week. If you can’t handle Milo of Croton’s soup bowl, how can you handle the Bidet Inspired By Your Favourite Greek Myth?

Sadly because the bowls were not being fired (because they would very obviously explode…) they were not being filled with Test Soup™ to see how hot the outside bowl got. So instead, Rich was slicing them open to stare into the void

Lovely void, beautiful void.

Given how tricky it looked to throw 1 bowl inside another bowl, I was very impressed that everyone managed to succeed in keeping the gap between the two layers. Admittedly, Diana’s was falling a little bit short of everyone else’s

but that’s mostly the fault of her trying to make too bowl-shaped a bowl

GOD FORBID.

I don’t know why this challenge annoyed me so much because it was a very good showcase of the potters’ throwing skills. I just wish it felt more like a real product, and at all connected to the main challenge? Vegetable Lamp = Vegetable Soup is a stretch that even I’m unwilling to make. But I’ll take it if it means Francesca gets to save herself by coming second

Oh, I was WAITING to write an entire screed about the defunctness of the Throwdown Challenges if Francesca had gone home this week. But my favourite gets to struggle through another week of being cursed as my favourite. When MasterChef starts, I’ll be accepting £10 bribes to call whoever you want eliminated my favourite. I’m the 2018 Australian National Cricket Team of reality TV.

An Official Thermal Bowl Ranking:
1. James’s Lovely Void, Beautiful Void
2. Francesca’s All Consuming Void
3. Natalie’s Hole Proficiency
4. Steve’s Having A Breakdown
5. Jonathan’s Excessively Bottomed Bowl
6. Imy’s Thermal Walls of Jericho
7. Diana Can Have A Little Void, As A Treat?

Vegging Out

With their partially formed vegetables dried to a leather hardness, it was time for the potters to refine and raw glaze them. Or in the case of Diana, try her best to polish a turd

truly this piece only got more upsetting as she slathered it in flesh-coloured glaze and with every new shot looked like she was straying further away from beetroot and closer to the climax of Akira

“It’ll fire to a deeper purple.” WILL IT DIANA, WILL IT?

in the most affectionate way possible: this is gloriously ugly. It’s the sort of thing you see in a shop where everything is WILDLY out of your price range and you just can’t look away so you spend 20 minutes just staring at it trying to invent the person that would buy it in your head. In this case, it’s a woman named Angela with questionable politics who runs a vegan café in Dorset where nobody flinches at being charged £15 for a sandwich that doesn’t come with a side of crisps. We all hate Angela.

Over in the other beetroot corner, thus began the defallusification of Natalie’s lamp, which she, admittedly quite sadly, pulled off really well!

what I would have given for her to turn up something that looked like Giuseppe Arcimboldo had vandalised his key stage 3 French textbook

there did seem to be a crack in the halved beetroot but it could also be the very authentic first attempt at slicing a beetroot that only ever gets halfway through because you underestimated how hard it is to cut a raw beetroot

the judges glossed over it, but that might have been because there were bigger cracks to fry when it came to Francesca’s popped corn

the cause of it being the thickness of her lamp wall when doubled up with the kernel sprig moulding. But I do have to kind of admire her for going SO BIG with the piece – she could barely see as she carried it to the drying room

especially when there didn’t seem to be a particular requirement for height and her only motivation seemed to be an emotional attachment to corn

safe to say *that* relationship is over and Francesca now reacts to popcorn like Kent in Stardew Valley

Friends fear she’s hyper-fixating again.

Francesca wasn’t the only one with popping issues as Imy was sure she’d forgotten something when it came to her building process

and because this came IMMEDIATELY after James giving a detailed explanation as to why he was putting holes around his mushrooms, you knew she’d forgotten to put a ventilation hole around her peas, which promptly detached themselves during the firing

but at least her lamp could still stand, even if it was at a slight angle

You could call it the Leaning Tower of Peas-a

a big night for Bonanno Pisano on the blog.

Ultimately the judges were disappointed that Imy’s entire lamp was so uniformly green wHich I feel like might not be an entirely valid critique on a week themed around VEGETABLES and felt more like a critique for the sake of critique

Umm, actually. It was 3 shades of green

but they did at least give her props for some of the smaller details – I loved the curly tendrils she had at the base and the light on the leaf looked really lovely

the slight browning at the stem was also a nice small detail that made the transition into the lamp more subtle. Much like Francesca, she deserved props for managing to make something so vertical when apparently going horizontal was an option

I don’t hate Jonathan’s lamp, I think it was actually one of the more sensible and certainly saleable creations – that’s not necessarily the point of the competition but I do like it when someone’s piece actually looks like it could sit in someone’s home. Or at least a questionably decorated café. I just didn’t entirely get Keith getting so worked up by it

but there are always potters that Keith vibes with harder than others. Do they happen to usually fit a demographic that it’s easier for him to project and recognise his own experiences in?

but I won’t begrudge Jonathan his moment and I did enjoy that I’ve never seen him happier in the pottery than when he was wiring his lamp

you feel your oats, you personification of the drawer your dad keeps dead batteries in.

James’s mushroom lamp was also pretty damn terrific and clearly the stand out of the episode

it’s just a really well conceptualised idea, granted that’s an easier task when there’s similar pieces out in the world so you kind of know it works as a concept to begin with as opposed to some of the others very much flying by the seats of their pants in the hopes a beetroot or a pea pod would work out. But James’s build quality and ability with glazes are always top notch and I do think it showcased a different side to his abilities – his personal style feels very graphic and two dimensional, whereas this had a lot of depth and detail

he was definitely the runaway winner of the episode, especially with Jonathan being his main rival and Steve falling a little bit short with the glazing of his artichoke being taken in an almost dragonfruit-esque direction

it still looks nice, but again, it’s a shape and style of lamp you know works because Laura Ashley sells a pair of them for £56

this feels like a call out post, but I promise it’s not. You take that Laura Ashley coin. Send them into administration again. A blight upon interior decorating.

An Unofficial Vegetable Lamp Ranking:
1. The World’s Your Oyster (mushroom) Now, James
2. Jonathan’s Pekingese Lamp
3. Natalie Won This Beet Off
4. Steve’s Artichoke in Dragonfruit Clothing
5. Diana’s Gibbering Mouther
6. The Leaning Tower of Peas-a
7. Francesca’s Popped Chances

Potter of the Week came down to Jonathan and James, not leaving mushroom for anyone else. James did deservedly take the spot though

would it have been more interesting to have given it to Jonathan? Sure, I’m not a fan of being 6 weeks in and only having three different potters being crowned Potter of the Week but I won’t rehash last week’s rant.

Deciding who was going home was very much down to being either Francesca or Imy. I did think that based on just how badly Francesca’s blew out, she was a goner. However, she did come second in the silly thermal bowl competition whereas Imy came 6th. Ultimately, they were probably tied and either could have gone and it wouldn’t have felt like an egregiously unfair decision but Imy did get the boot

I enjoyed the improvement we’ve seen in Imy’s pieces – the level up in skill between her slab building a gesturally circular clock to making a fully realised peapod lamp is incredible. She’s been a joy to watch and I’ll miss the banter between her and Siobhan – they seemed quite close.

And so, 6 move on to Divorce Settlement Week