Giant Teapot, Cup & Saucer
This was a bespoke project for event prop hire and consisted of designing and build a giant teapot, cup and saucer. The final product was to be used by Heston Blumenthal on ‘Heston’s Fantastical Food’. The teapot design was inspired by vintage bone china pots with the graphics being simple and in keeping with that style.
The teapot was huge and was fitted with a boiler that contained 500l of water. The diameter of the main pot was an epic 2.2m wide, the dimension from the spout to the handle was a staggering 4.6m and the height of the pot was a huge 2.5m. To build something this scale was quite the challenge, the model itself was very straight-forward as it started with a stock model available in 3Ds Max. The real challenge came with developing this model to suit the needs of holding a giant boiler. This problem was solved by creating a removable section at the side of the pot. The teapot 3D model was then sliced up so that it could be milled out of polystyrene in pieces on a large format CNC, these pieces were then tidied up and fibreglassed to create a strong outer coating. The giant cup and saucer were also created in the same way however that design and process was much easier than the giant teapot.
The next challenge now that the teapot, cup and saucer had a smooth and tough fibreglass finish was to create the graphic design. I designed the rose motif on adobe illustrator then once it was approved I turned the design into a series of stencils. It was quite complex, with there being 4 stencils in total per rose.
The teapot, cup and saucer were an amazing success and featured pride of place on Heston’s Fantastical Food. It was taken to East Lancashire where it created one of the biggest tea breaks ever seen. No giant teapot would be worth much without a giant pyramid teabag to go with! Heston created one that was used inside of the teapot to create a real proper brew! Alongside this, Heston also created the worlds largest Digestive that was dunked into the giant cup and saucer.
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