Calm down Fifty Shades of Clay.

Week 3 of Rich Miller Trying To Learn how To Build a Canoe: Efforts are still proving fruitless.

I know I can’t start all of these with an apology but I’ve been stressing out about having missed last week’s recap and it’s made writing this one a little bit anxiety inducing. But I am sorry, I’m still trying to get into the rhythm of it all after the slight break – and I love being back, the response to that first recap was almost overwhelming which made not getting the second one out a bit disappointing but I’m determined for the next one to come out in the first half of next week – there’s a Chinese take away as a reward riding on it!

Last week we did sadly lose early Blog Favourite Edward for his leaking icefish gluggle jug and the marine life of the world has never been in more danger

that’s the face of a man who is going to dry out the oceans. So, while he perfects his plan to find Groudon, the others have to endeavour with yet more pieces of Victoriana.

Flatback, Back, Back Again

Kicking off this week’s challenges, the potters had to slab build a pair of Staffordshire Flatbacks, which apparently aren’t a breed of tiny lapdog popular amongst the great aunts that got kept in the attic during the Victorian era but are instead those mantelpiece ornaments that were popular amongst the great aunts that got kept in the attic during the Victorian era

Sadly nobody was taking the bait to introduce us to their pets by making a pair of Staffordshire dog figurines so they just had to have some ominously loom behind Rich like the twins from The Shining for a bit

sadly we didn’t get a lot of animals, although we did get Dave’s tale of losing a bicycle mounted joust to a badger

I won’t make fun of him for it because it doesn’t even take a badger to knock me off a bicycle – I have two morbid fears in this world: two wheeled transport and children with balloons the latter of which was thankfully not rendered in clay this week and Dave was the only one willing to attempt to slab build bicycles. But Rich still only had one thing on his mind

he’s going to get those canoe blueprints out of Dave one way or another and now he knows Dave’s kryptonite: surprise badgers.

Meanwhile, Dan got no love for the second outing of his own love of canoeing because if you didn’t make it with your own bare hands, it doesn’t count!

I also know that that’s actually a kayak, I just needed a segue that worked better than… this

these are not the watersports you’re looking for.
As well as his love for kayaking on the open ocean and therefore being nominated Mostly Likely To Fake His Own Death and Move to Panama, Dan also apparently really loves that one scene from Brokeback Mountain

what happens on the Dorset coast, stays on the Dorset Coast.

In a similar vein, Daniel was also taking an outdoorsy approach with his flatbacks being inspired by his fondness of scuba diving and that time he went hiking in Yosemite National Park and may have seen someone plummeting to their death?

it’s giving Free Solo – the only movie I have ever screamed “OH GOD NO!” out loud during. Well, except CATS (2019) but those were very different “Oh God no”s.

The great outdoors was a popular source of inspiration, Cadi was combining wild swimming in Germany with swimming on the Brighton seaside

the Venn diagram for people who do wild swimming and pottery is a perfect circle.
Her flatbacks did also serve a useful secondary function in that they were big enough to serve as a deathmask

we are still yet to have that as a designated challenge but as we draw ever closer to jumping the bidet shark in Bathroom Week, it is only a matter of time before we have someone making a Napoleonic visage for their childhood hamster, Mr. Snuffles.

You would think Cadi almost managing to wear her flatbacks like Tutankhamun’s burial mask would make them the biggest flatbacks in contention, however Jan’s looked about the size of the average Bosch oven

although it was all in keeping with her chosen Steampunk theme because if you’ve ever been on a bus in York during the Railway Museum’s Steampunk Day you know that nobody takes up more space on public transport than a woman who is 80% petticoat and 20% miscellaneous gears

and like everyone who has found themselves a part of the steampunk community, it all happened completely by accident

it’s a bit like aesthetic wisdom teeth, it sort of just happens to you. One day you’re Jan and the next you’re Captain Cassandra Copperclank, zeppelin pilot of the steampowered fleet.

Steven and Shani were both going with childhood inspirations – the latter once again drawing from her memories of fishing with her father for one of them, although this time her make would be clownfishless but there was a sea turtle so she’s slowly working her way through the cast of Finding Nemo, and the other featuring her cooking with her mother

it was a bit of an emotional build for her as she talked about the fact she doesn’t have any photographs from that period of her life due to them being lost in the tsunami – although saying that Keith did not shed a tear. Perfectly render the Belfast’s Samson and Goliath? BLUBBING! Recant your deepest personal trauma? Stone faced. Get him on the inevitable Red Nose Day celebrity version of The Traitors, he’d be unstoppable.

Steven’s childhood inspiration was a little less tropical, as he took us to the sunny climes of Cleethorpes with its donkey rides and 98% of the nation’s supply of 2p coins

he had a bit of a stressful build and he and his clay may have to invest in a bit of couple’s therapy

I’ll buy him a novelty pierside boutique T-shirt that says “I went on Pottery Throwdown and all I got was a grudge”.

Sophie was also taking a little bit from her childhood with one of her flatbacks drawing from her childhood ballet lessons and they other being of her graduating from university with a first class degree in Design Crafts (she didn’t brag about that on the show so I scoped her Instagram feed to make sure we brag for her – I would have bet my life she was an english lit girlie)

she was going for a more stylised character, or at least I hope Sophie doesn’t really think she has a squidward nose. I think it was definitely the way to go in this challenge, there is nothing worse than trying to render a semi-realistic looking person in clay – she says like she’s Michelangelo but really her only experience of it is an hour long year 8 art class – which does feel a little bit like the petri dish that Pottery Throwdown was cultivated from.

Donna was also going with a transitional piece, her two flatbacks being inspired by Belfast, featuring the iconic Harland & Wolff shipyard cranes as well as the concrete cows of Milton Keynes where she worked as an art teacher and presumably gave many a 12 year old a time management complex by making them try to build something in only 1 hour and then they never saw it again (WHERE IS IT MR. LONGMUIR? WHERE IS IT? DID YOU EAT IT LIKE WE ALL PRESUMED?)

I do love that the illustrators for the Throwdown sketches clearly don’t have as much to annotate as the likes of Sewing Bee and Bake Off always do so you end up with a lone and very excited exclamation of “CONCRETE COW!” when they can finally do it.

A Close Shave

For the Unspecified But Clearly Evident Victorian Week Throwdown Challenge, the potters were tasked with making a Shaving Scuttle which looks a bit like a toilet and a Toby jug decided to have a baby; a tryst of such illogical proportions that I guess it makes the Shaving Scuttle the Pugsky of the pottery world

and like most Victorian inventions, I cannot quite work out how it works and Princess was only confusing matters by forgetting to cut a hole through to the spout

not that this greatly hindered her, she still managed to come second which you’d think would reflect very poorly on everyone else’s builds but even Jan who came in last place had a recognisable shaving scuttle (she says having only just learned what one was)

it does however look a little bit like a house from The Flintstones – you cannot tell me it’s not the 1 bedroom studio apartment Fred moves into once Wilma comes to her senses, divorces him, takes him for all he’s worth and marries her vacuum mammoth

it was 10,000 BC – different times.

Besides remembering where to put the holes, the other thing that was giving the potters a little bit of trouble was the creation of the handle, which was meant to be done by playing MacGyver and engineering a piece of wire into a clay cutting tool

Jan was particularly perplexed and is definitely more of a Columbo kind of girl

she got one vaguely passable handle out of her block and looked like a disappointed fisherwife who was ready to slap her husband with the single pilchard he’d returned from a week at sea with

meanwhile Sophie’s terror gave us the second best look to camera of the week

naturally, the best one is Ross’s look to camera during the argument over whose mum Diane got to be

It was a strong week for fourth wall breaks.

This unique and torturous method of handle making was clearly because they’d received too many complaints about previous handle making endeavours

but potters are going to be potters and if Shani is going to do anything, it’s not quite follow through on what the Throwdown Challenge brief actually was

she still managed to come 6th purely for having the gaul and because Dave’s handle was an even more egregious abandonment of specifications

and Donna and Daniel both had the problem that their shaving scuttles were too small and would make the average Victorian gentleman feel a little bit inadequate

“Sir, you’re teeny tiny shaving scuttle is ready”

Truly excelling in the challenge though was Sophie who basically perfected the challenge thus knocking Dan from his spot as Throwdown Tyrant of the Year

we were so concerned about the Throwdow Tyrant at the top, we forgot about the Throwdown Tyrant at the bottom

Jan ruling that last place spot like a Colossal Squid ruling the abyss of the ocean – nothing but respect for my metaphorical cephalopod overlord.

An Official Shaving Scuttle Ranking
1. Sophie, Scuttle Battle Winner
2. Princess’s Chocolate Teapot of a Shaving Scuttle
3. Cadi Probably Should Have Been Second But At Least She Still Got a Medal
4. Steven’s Narrow Rimming
5. The Danfall
6. Shani’s Well Handled Handle
7. Dave’s Desperate Plait
8. Donna, Size Matters
9. Daniel, Size Matters (but slightly worse, I guess?)
10. Jan’s Prehistoric Shaving Scuttle

Flatbacks Against The Wall

Most of the potters were able to celebrate their flatbacks returning from the kilns full of back and nary a crack except for Shani and Steven, the latter of which found himself to have created the premier flat-backed rockin’g’ donkey (my favourite Elton John song)

but despite his flatbacks being as unstable as every seaside attraction feels, his decoration of them was incredibly charming

I absolutely love that donkey one – the negative space really makes it look special.

As for Shani’s, she had some pretty big cracks going through her flatbacks

and she made the rookie mistake of taking her time to decorate her first flatback and then had to rush the second one so it did kind of fall a little short in regards to everyone else’s

Donna however once again truly excelled in the glazing department, I missed last week’s recap but her koi fish are one of my favourite pieces anyone has made on this show, and her decoration of her flatbacks certainly didn’t let her down this week

these definitely felt the most like you’d see them on a mantlepiece with the mirroring of their layouts without being absolutely identical – it was just a really clever and smartly thought out design and all the more credit to her because it was her first time using oxides as well.
I thought Dave also did a phenomenal job of staying true to the brief by creating something that was very shallow but felt much deeper because of some clever optical tricks

the rolling hills in the background were so well done and given that every artist I’ve ever come across counts bicycles as one of the four horsemen of the artistic apocalypse (the other three are cowboy hats, hands and ironically, horses – the worst thing to have to draw is a bicycle riding cowboy) he did really well!

Skintones gave the potters a lot of concerns because of the tempermentalness of glazes during the firing process and while most of them ended up fine, it’s safe to say I don’t think Dan fully intended for his to look like the depiction of the last remaining survivors of a nuclear holocaust

but to be fair, he’s perfectly depicted what camping truly feels like to me – I will never stop making my parents feel guilty about making us camp on a cliff on the Isle of Wight in 2008 in the middle of the stormiest summer on record at the time

NO MOTHER, IT WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA. (I slept in the car and everyone else stayed in the tent because I’m ✨selfish✨)

Daniel completely sidestepped the fear of skin tones and facial expressions with the galaxy brained move to have his characters facing away or covered entirely in spandex (safe for work edition)

he’s playing 4D chess and everyone else is playing handmade artisanal checkers.
He did however get dinged for his figures seeming a little bit too stiff and static, a problem Princess managed to overcome with her dancerly figure and musician

I adore these, I think there’s a delightful airport art kitschiness to them, a bit like those hula dancing dashboard figurines. I just find them incredibly charming and her manipulation of the clay for the dancer’s skirt deserved more credit than a passing “well done”.

While most worried about skin tones and potentially turning their flatbacks into a relief of the cast of Geordie Shore, Cadi and Jan had a more logistical problem in how exactly they were going to glaze their flatbacked behemoths in the glazing tub

after more wiggling and repositioning than the average game of Hole in the Wall (BRING IT BACK YOU COWARDS), they did manage to get them dunked so nobody had to go bother the Staffordshire Pentecostal Church about using their baptismal pool and inducting a steampunk Mrs. Claus into their congregation

these were absolutely adorable and Jan really captured the aesthetic of the original flatbacks in the colouring, the proportions and the facial expressions. They were however still too big and only just fit on the mantelpiece

those are an Agatha Christie murder weapon waiting to happen.

Cadi also did really well with the judges, although on television I think they perhaps came across as a little more washed out than they actually were because Keith and Rich both praised the amount of detail

and while the texture and translucency of the water is incredibly well done, the people within are a little lost amongst it all.

Lastly we have Sophie with her ballerina and graduate flatbacks

they certainly have a lot of charm and I love the stylsation of the figures – they remind me a lot of the sort of birthday cards you find in a local gift shop where the joke is mostly “Ha. Mum, you drink a lot of gin… _{(please get help, we’re worried.)}” and I do mean that entirely complimentarily. I’ kind of wish the tree with the ballerina was more of a bush though I’m not sure the tree with the ballerina works exactly, but I do love that it’s a very good rendering of the song The Tragedy by Annisokay. (a reference only for me that puts my music taste entirely on blast)

An Unofficial Flatback Ranking
1. Donna’s CONCRETE COWS!
2. Jan’s Steampunk Behemoths
3. Dave’s Badger Surprise!
4. Sophie’s Graduation (brag)
5. The Perfectly Circular Venn Diagram of Potters and Wild Swimmers
6. Princess’s Salsa Lessons (£25 an hour)
7. Dan’s 3 Mississippis
8. Daniel’s Rigid Diver
9. Steven’s Flatbacked Rockin’ Donkey (available on vinyl!)
10. Shani’s Continued Exploration of Sri Lanka’s Marine Life

Raking in her second Potter of the Week in only 3 weeks was Donna

and having managed to just skate through after being in the danger zone twice before, luck was out for Shani

God bless her, she was a wholesome delight (even if she did knock out my early favourite but I’ll forgive her.)

And thanks again for being so patient with me trying to find my feet with the ol’ recap schedule.

And so, 9 potters move on to Raku Week!

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