The recap could just be this one image.

More like TERRORcotta, am I right?

Chiminea Enough

It’s Ill-advised Terracotta Week and due to how the main challenge works, I’m just going to start with this week’s Nonsense Throwdown in which the potters had to make two thirds of a chiminea

and between the six contestants who hadn’t sensed imminent disaster and forged a doctor’s note (Emily was sick) they barely ended up with two thirds of a chiminea between them all. To make this clay-based humiliation ritual even more of an ordeal, they were joined by guest judge and king of girthsome throwing, Gabriel Nichols

who gleefully threw them to the terracotta wolves and as they returned with clay EVERYWHERE and the look in their eyes of someone who ‘d had to eat their trench foot riddled toes to survive the trenches of World War 1

he told them that his third year apprentices wouldn’t have been working with lumps of clay this big

he was lucky he didn’t get a ballistic terracotta missile fired at him

I am so sorry to Fynn, but watching him yeet half a chiminea across the room is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on broadcast television. I will be nominating it for the BAFTA TV Moment of the Year – it’s stiff competition from Celia Imrie Farting and Nikita Kuzmin During Randomly Generated Dance Death but I believe in this pile of primordial terracotta soldier goo

When will you do Qin Dynasty Funerary Art Week?

Despite having watched Fynn suplex a chiminea like Brock Lesnar, Angharad was still convinced she was going to come last

read the room, girl! I mean, to be fair, it wasn’t an entirely out there assumption, her chiminea did look like Belial from Basket Case (it’s perfect TO ME)

but Fynn’s was still in two halves, having somehow in the last few minutes of the challenge thrown together a perfectly passable replacement piece of chiminea (I’m greatly enjoying the word “chiminea”)

Gabriel was very complimentary of the rim thickness though.

Everyone else at least had something that looked marginally more like a Chiminea however utterly inoperational they would ever be. My personal favourite is Naveed’s that looks a bit like the evil stove that lives on the moon from Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out had a baby with an artisanal pizza oven

Elham hadn’t got far enough to planning the window trim so sort of just gouged a deep frowny face into her chiminea that looked like Mr. Miserable had finally found his 13th reason

so much for thoughts and prayers….

and thus Kayleigh, who was barely able to look a chiminea in the eyes at the beginning of the challenge

managed to beat Elham and Naveed purely on account of having a window and not looking like it was painfully herniating

and while everyone began to think of other uses for the baling twine that was meant to keep their rapidly melting chiminea easter eggs together, Bill was having a great time and barely breaking a sweat

he’d even remembered the all important chimney spigot that everyone else forgot about around the point that Fynn had started using 8kgs of terracotta like a shuriken

the cruelty of making Angharad’s groundhogging chiminea sit next to Bill’s <3

An Official Chiminea Ranking:
1. Bill’s Two Thirds of a Chiminea
2. Failing Upwards!
3. Naveed’s Haunted Pizza Oven
4. Elham’s Seasonal Depression Chiminea
5. Angharad’s Self-imploding Chiminea
6. Fynn’s Chiminea Cannonballs

Tagine Team

If one of my favourite occasional occurrences on Pottery Throwdown is Wicked Wildlife Wango Week, then my least favourite is Terracotta Week as the show continues to refuse to learn the lesson that terracotta is not conducive to the constraints of this show. And much like Terracotta Week being an unwieldy concept that you have no idea where to put, this week the potters were making a tagine

and if you’re thinking “Haven’t they done this before?” YES AND IT WENT BADLY

I miss series 4, remember when Henry carved the cool S and an ass into a tagine? Truly he was the best Little Guy to ever grace this show

but series 4 does show that things could’ve been worse, you could’ve had to make 3 pieces of fully glazed terracotta cookware. This time they just had to make the additional coal brazier that the tagine stood on which came with the added complication of having to be very good with measurements with both it and the fit of the lid.

Emily was well enough to get through the entire tagine making…. process? ordeal? saga? Odyssey? Although you could see the rapidly approaching 39 degree fever by the end of it

but before Emily became a victim of domestic terracottism and started tasting sounds, the concept of her Tagine was to decorate it with sgraffito illustrations of the spices commonly used in North African cuisine. Which I think is a really good idea, and then you try drawing cardamom pods and crocus flowers and you suddenly end up with a gay fertility tagine

The T in LGBT stands for Tagine now.

Kayleigh’s brazier also featured crocus flowers – I’m having a difficult time reading them as such but I’ll trust her on that because the least anyone deserves this episode is the benefit of the doubt

of which Keith was very impressed had come out as sturdy as they had… before promptly breaking one mid-sentence

so now he has to buy it

Kayleigh’s tagine was inspired by some of the architecture she’d seen in Marrakech and for that I think she could’ve been a little more vibrant with her sgraffito

but I do think they were incredibly tight-arsed with the time allocation for the glazing portion because everyone had really pretty illustrations in their moodboards and the resulting tagines very much looked like they’d had to be done by the time Keith’s soup finished heating in the microwave. To the point Siobhan had to be deployed to go tell the potters to reassess their plans

or just remind Kayleigh that the drying room existed and she didn’t have to stand there like a lemon with the hairdryer – it was delirium hours at Gladstone this week

And said glazing had to be done incredibly carefully as the potters were painting it onto raw unfired clay, so it had to be a thin layer to help the glaze release moisture during the firing process and stop it from flaking off. Nobody really succeeded in that regard and in hindsight they probably should’ve communicated to the potters that the white engobe needed to be watered down instead of letting them stumble across that fun little tidbit on their own

Naveed may have found the secret to successful engobification but he had the most awful time trying to make a tagine lid

unfortunately you can’t mime your way out of this, babe

I think he would regard making a tagine as being harder than climbing to the summit of Toubkal in the Atlas Mountains which the tagine was inspired by

and the brazier’s prongs were designed to look like traditional Moroccan balghas (someone let me know if that’s not the correct pluralisation) of which he had brought in his pair

and I was VERY worried about them because Kayleigh’s Docs were being relentless caked in mud like that poor woman in the off-putting Project Makeover adverts

Naveed was one of the potters that Siobhan had had to stage the world’s most polite intervention for and in the end his Tagine looked good but everything about it was a bit small

both in scope and stature, you’re not fitting a meal for 4 in that thing! And the brazier is a sort of hand-held pocket brazier for when you need to tagine on the go!

there was still a lot to like about it – the shoes on the brazier are adorable and I wish the mountains along the bottom of the lid were visible when the tagine was closed because it was definitely Naveed’s best design element

Elham’s was probably the most simplified, colour-wise, in terms of the moodboard to Terracotta Disaster Week pipeline

I ultimately don’t think it harms the design too much, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the speckled sgraffito but understand it as a design choice within the context of Potter vs Microwave Soup and I do think she had the most successfully tagine-shaped tagine? Maybe second only to Angharad

the tiled-effect glazing on the lid is incredible and it was such a savvy idea to do it using sponges instead of sketching it out herself

I just maybe wish that her brazier measured up to the concept of the tagine? But saying that, I also have no idea what Elham’s prongs were meant to be? She said she’d been to Morocco numerous times so I’m sure she was referencing something specific. Unlike Bill who knows two things about North Africa: it’s hot and has goats

this delights me – there’s some blistering on the glaze but it’s kind of redundant to mention that because everyone’s glazes were flaking like eczematic lizards

I do feel like Bill deserved more kudos for the glazing than he got purely because it does seem like a real effort to refine his work which often has a very rough-and-ready rusticness to it (which he does well.) There were issues with the build though, his brazier had a large stress crack right around the interior

but I’m not sure anyone had a fully clean brazier build?

Naturally Fynn had my favourite brazier the moment he brought up Redstarts – my 87th favourite bird sandwiched between the Lammergeier which has killed as least one person by dropping a bone on their head and Hamlet the Blue Ring-necked Parakeet Specifically

Day 5 of inserting bird facts into a recap until I eventually get around to making my bird fact themed podcast.

As well as the redstart brazier, Fynn’s tagine was decorated with patterns resembling his own tattoos which looked really effective

it was no surprise that his sgraffito work was so good, I’m sure there’s a lot about the steadiness and pressure needed for it are easily transferable from tattooing. And I’m sure it’s easier too because your tagine doesn’t have to ask for a smoke break to go and cry around the corner while popping another pack of paracetamol in private.

An Unofficial Tagine Ranking
1. Elham’ Tagine-shaped Tagine
2. Fynn’s Tatt-gine
3. Bill’s GOATed Tagine
4. Angharad’s Family Tie-ls
5. You Break It, You Buy It
6. The LGBTagine+
7. Making Molehills out of Mountains

It wasn’t the strongest week for anyone in the main make (we must kill Terracotta Week) but that did mean it was a prime opportunity to give Potter of the Week to a potter that hasn’t won before and just for her trajectory thus far in the competition, I do think Elham deserved the accolade

and then it came to the elimination which they decided that because Emily was suffering from terracotta-induced psychosis and the degree of struggle bussing throughout NOBODY would be going home which I think ultimately benefitted Naveed most of all

and Siobhan was REALLY trying to make this sound like a good development but knowing that it was difficult to choose the worst of a not stellar showing is not the inspirational story they wanted it to be. I also don’t think any of that is the potters’ fault and I do think not eliminating anyone for a challenge that’s using both a fairly specialist material AND being done in a manner that isn’t setting anyone up for success was fair. So I look forward to the next two terracotta-free years before it rears it’s horrible gross face again.

And so, nothing has changed!