Don’t worry mate, it’s happened to everyone.

Dan’s going goblin mode.

Water Mess

Garden Week brings on the biggest throwing job of the series (so far, I’ve got everything crossed this is the amuse-bouche to the childhood trauma inspired bidet of Bathroom Week.) For this big build, the potters were having to make a three tiered water feature to help them answer the classical music and feminist film theory questions on University Challenge

and the whole thing had to be inspired by their woodland experiences…

what happened in Epping Forest, stays in Epping Forest.

Speaking of beavers and phallic growths in the forest:

Cadi was taking her inspiration from the forests of Germany because Britain’s woodland wildlife is, let’s be honest, rather passé but I applaud Springwatch for its Gretchen Wieners-esque dedication to making British beavers happen

as it turns out, Germany’s wildlife isn’t *that* different from ours, the star of the show in this case was Cadi’s Golden Oriole, which makes the occasional unplanned visit to the UK when it gets blown off course during its migration and the UK Twitching community erupts into chaos. I presume Cadi is a member of said community purely on the grounds she seems to love drawing tender Heron x Oriole fanart

it’s a star crossed lovers plot and the Beaver is the Mercutio in this situation.

The only other potter going particularly big with their animal inspiration was Donna who was being absolutely unhinged and promising us a three tiered boa constrictor

the piece was of course inspired by the story of Saint Patrick chasing the snakes of out of Ireland

“She’s never going to get this done” I said, having momentarily forgotten that Donna was once bitten by a radioactive potter’s wheel and has since developed superhuman pottery skills. Her only momentary fumble was when she gave Siobhan a spare bit of clay to have fun pretending to make snake skin with and it turned out Siobhan’s bigger netting worked better than Donna’s finer mesh

I imagine that’s the same face Bertoldo di Giovanni pulled when Michelangelo made the statue of David. (Don’t check the timeline, trust me that it works out.)

Donna wasn’t the only one who Siobhan was “helping” as she gravitated towards Steven having an absolute blast ruining his sieves in an effort to make moss and making plenty of content for R/Popping’s Wacky Wednesday posts

he’s very experienced in dealing with toddlers though and Siobhan challenging him to a fencing duel didn’t bother him for even a moment

and he was able to carry on with his moss covered tree as Siobhan imaginably swung a broom around pretending to be Joseph Bologne (as all 4 years olds do… just me?)

as you can imagine, trees were a very popular motif, a poplar motif if you will

Jan was particularly leaning in with her piece being inspired by the unique ecosystem within an oak tree (we ALL remember that Year 5 biology lesson) with her piece featuring lots of small and intricate details including hollow branch spouts

we’ll have to wait and see if Jan is as in love with ecology as much now as she was prior to having to build a series of tiny clay animals

FUCK THE VOLES, CLINT!

Dave was also going for a whole ecosystem of critters, although he’d made the smart choice of making slugs, which are basically evolution rolling a sausage of clay and calling it a day

I don’t know when I developed such a vendetta against British wildlife? I blame the Countryfile calendar (NEVA4GET MOUSEGATE)

Dan had a similar get out of jail free card with his water feature being inspired by his kids’ imaginary games they played in the forest

so if the crocodile didn’t look that much like a crocodile, that was fine, it was a log the whole time

fortunately for him, his crocodile turned out pretty cool in that gnarled elder god ways that most reptiles do

but while his crocodile got a lot of attention, the goblin sitting at the top of the water featured was birthed forth into existence in two minutes by mostly by mushing bits of clay together and jabbing a pair of eye holes into it like someone with aphantasia trying to imagine something

you know the trope in horror movies where they find a weird doll in the forest? Very that. Dan however was living a very different horror movie as one of the tiers for his water feature had to be scrapped because he’d forgotten to clean it out and had accidentally somehow glued the former inside it – I won’t pretend I understand quite what happened but he was forced to turn to his Prince Harry

every family needs one, where else do you get your kidneys from?

Sophie and Princess were also both going with an imagination theme, specifically fairytales. Sophie being more explicit with it (as in “On The Nose”, not NSFW Big Bad Wolf fanart… although…) She was planning on building her own fairy tree house, which is a brave thing to do considering one of the best builds of the show was Adam’s fairy house lantern a few years ago

JUSTICE FOR THE TINY WASHING LINE THAT LIVES RENT FREE IN MY HEAD (one of the greatest miscarriages of pottery justice since… well, most of what the British Museum has done)

but Sophie was up for the intricate job of fae architecture

the sketch artist did her slightly dirty by making it look like fairies construct their windows out of slices of tomato – Sophie’s end result didn’t look nearly as much like someone had thrown a Caprese Salad at an oak tree as they would have you believe.

Princess was being a lot more subtle with her fairytale inspiration, choosing to add her favourite childhood stories as easter eggs throughout her tiers, which were more strongly themed around the four seasons

and with having been criticised a little bit for perhaps playing it a little safe in terms of decoration, she was going all out to put most of the extra decorating… inside of the bowls

oh no… Siobhan did *try* to warn her with as strong a nudge of concern as she could manage without physically shaking her

however Princess was sold on her approach

spoiler alert:

However, given the water features were, what? 2 feet at most? You were going to be looking down inside of them unless you were on all fours amongst the begonias for some reason

You should see my folder of cut jokes when I win a battle against my impulsive thoughts.

Hedgehogging Your Bets

It was another Throwing Challenge for this week’s Still Irregularly Named Second Challenge (I got in trouble with someone for calling last week’s Great British Ornithological Doodle-a-thon a “Throwdown”). It was back to the wheel for the potters as they had to create a Hedgehog House, an invention almost certainly created by someone who accidentally broke a chimney pot in half and 1 hedgehog went under it 1 time and now you just get your grandma one of them for Christmas when you have no other ideas and at best you’ve made the perfect environment for woodlice to thrive

so basically they were making a chimney pot and then roughly chopping a third of it off, which imaginably goes on to be used a council flat for dormice

and in order to do all of this, they had 20 minutes, which did include the 5 minutes needed to give your hedgehog house a full Brazilian blowout

“Got any holidays planned for the summer?”
“Gina, it’s January, please just cut my fringe.”

I do love a nonsense challenge, it’s been such a long time since the wildly impractical Alabama Ring Flasks of Series 4

I’ll never forgive Rich for gaslighting everyone into believing these were a thing, so I am 100% on side with Princess’s glorious eye roll at the very mention of a hedgehog house

meanwhile Jan was experiencing all 5 stages of grief and a few special bonus ones all at the same time

and true to form she bottomed out the pack with a combined kitchen-bedroom apartment that would still have a four figure rent in central London

room for 1 single bed and a rice cooker – you can shower at the gym. That’ll be £2500 per month, please.

On the other end of the spectrum was Dan’s endless hedgehog hallway whose interior I imagined worked a bit like a Scooby Doo chase scene

and he’d taken to luring in any gullible hedgehogs by scrawling “HOME” on it with his thumb which was giving very Questionable Van Energy

I admired Dan’s dedication to cursed pottery objects, I’m just sorry for the amount of hedgehogs that go mysteriously missing in the Dorset area because of it.
Dave had gone for a lot less sinister form of semiotics with his hedgehog symbol that looked more like a lot of DeviantArt Sonic OCs than it needed to

you will not believe the amount of cropping and rearranging I had to do to get a safe for work screenshot of that search and even then, I’m a little dubious on a couple of them – I see you FurAffinity.

One of the things most of the potters got dinged for was creating a too concave a structure – Hedgehogs, much like the Georgians, favour a narrower, straighter architecture which Donna perfectly pulled off but was only placed third because her decoration made it a little too obvious that they were just making chimney pots

Lesson 1 of Pottery Throwdown: Don’t Rumble The System.

Placing above Donna were Princess for her very precise build that she was stocking full of hope so there’s no room for much of a hedgehog

and coming top of the class and winning this round of Hedgehog Homes Under The Hammer was Steven for his perfectly shaped house

I am worried that this challenge turned everyone into landlords though.

An Official Hedgehog House Ranking:
1. Steven’s 2 Bed Detached House With Generously Sized Garden and Room to Extend.
2. Princess’s End of terrace Home, Ideal For First Time Buyers
3. Donna, That’s A Chimney Pot
4. Dan’s Unsellable Hedgehog Murder House
5. Sophie’s Mid-terrace With Noisy Neighbours
6. Dave’s Subsidence That He Should’ve had a Surveyor Check For
7. Cadi’s Girthy Hog Home
8. Jan’s Condemned Former Marijuana Farm

Ready, Steady, Flow!

With this being the biggest build so far, it wasn’t too much of a surprise that many of the potters had run into a fair few structural concerns – with many of the biggest bowls coming back cracked with the only hopes for repair being to fill it with “general crud” and prayer (very southern baptist-core)

at some point we’re going to have to have them add Kilnism as an official religion on the national census because at this point I think we’ve surpassed Minor Cult status. Although the minor miracles are few and far between as, unsurprisingly, “crud” and prayer can’t stitch clay back together

but the outside of Cadi’s Tour of Germany’s Only Three Animals was pretty great

and as much as that Oriole is a beautiful star of the show, nothing charmed me more than her supremely pissed off Heron that had the sort of eyebrow that would’ve made the Instagram girlies quake in 2016

although I say “nothing charmed me more” but that’s a lie because, Keith may not have liked him, but I would DIE for Dan’s horrible little goblin that looks like one of those Chinese Crested dogs that keeps winning The World’s Ugliest Dog competition

remember the Franz Klammer pepper pot? I mean, how could you forget the Franz Klammer pepper pot

I am 100% devoted to writing excessively raunchy Horrible Goblin x Franz Klammer Pepper Pot fanfics now. They’re both perfect and I will not have any slander against My Boys™

They’re MY Heartstopper.
(every now and again, I get halfway through editing an asset for this blog and I have an existential crisis about what I’m doing with my life)

As for the parts of Dan’s water feature that didn’t do horrendous things to my already fragile brain, it was good! The texture he’d got on the bowls from the sodium silicate he’d used gave them a really interesting look that helped set him apart from the other potters

and while I lavish the Horrible Little Goblin with as much praise as someone who refuses to acknowledge their new born baby looks like a partially chewed doughnut (THEY ALL DO), I would be loathe to omit praise for the crocodile that looks like the love child of Falkor the luckdragon and that Hedgehog Cake with the jelly teeth

and I mean that as the highest of compliments. I just love that Dan really swings for the fences; a photorealistic snake is a great achievement but you know…. horrible one of a kind goblin that looks like Julia LePetit tried to draw The Great Gazoo from memory

he is my entire personality now.

All that being said, Donna’s photorealistic snake was insane

You know that myth that being able to draw a perfect circle is a sign of sociopathy? I, as someone who would fail even Big Brother’s psych evals, just wanna *see* Donna’s forms because this is the most unhinged (tone indicator: positive) build we’ve seen since the sea turtle toilet

and hopefully they’ll soon be joined by a spitting cobra bidet and eventually we’ll have a whole photorealistic reptile themed bathroom set. The water feature counts as a sink for now.

It was another week where Donna could have easily walked a win, however she got dinged for the flow of her water being too uniform and instead the judges were much more charmed by Steven’s ode to moss

I mostly appreciated the extra effort of him twinning with his water feature

I wish there was a little more differentiation in the colours of the moss, it starts to lean a little bit alien-y or that time Gia Metric dressed up as mold and nobody knew what the hell she was meant to be on Drag Race Canada (she was The Horrible Goblin of that season)

but I did love the application and method of making the moss, which had a genuinely pillowy soft look that is hard to achieve in clay, it does have a lushness to it, and as though it might grow over your hand if you touched it

so it may be a bit of a sensory nightmare, but it’s a beautiful sensory nightmare.

It was a tough call for Potter of the Week between Steven and Jan – the vast difference between their hedgehog housing plans ultimately splitting them apart, had Jan just added an en suite to her hedgehog house, she could have potentially clinched it because her water feature was immaculate

it’s one of those pieces where you’ll notice something new every time you return to it and while the insects and the bird are cute

her mouse that looked more like the “Don’t Talk Me. I’m Angy” cat was the star of the show

cats aren’t not woodland creatures, I’ve read Erin Hunter’s entire back catalogue. It should surprise nobody that my list of Mastermind specialist subjects are Warrior Cats, Animal Crossing and The Works of Love Productions. There’s a reason they’ll never accept my application.

Dave has the last of the works grounded in reality, unless you too choose to believe that Lemon Slugs are a figment of our collective imagination like The Monopoly Man’s monocle, the movie Shazaam and Liz Truss’s brief joyride of an incumbency

it was a very good piece of work – the middle bowl gets a little bit muddy looking but the top and bottom bowls are up there with last week’s turkey and he set a very high benchmark for the other potters to live up to

I don’t know what kind of dentist Keith is going to, mine only has commercial local radio playing at a weirdly low level and I can tell you now – ASMR volume half-hearted remixes of Dua Lipa songs and adverts for sketchy sounding secondhand car dealerships doesn’t help relax you ahead of having a tooth extracted. I’ll make sure to add “A lemon slug accented water feature in the waiting room” in their suggestions box.

Now for the battle of the fairytales and both Princess and Sophie were on a pretty equal footing as both of their largest bowls returned from the kiln with a few cracks that only proved to get bigger come the second firing. So the only thing left to separate them was their decoration with Rich and Keith leaning much more in favour of Sophie’s more intricate exterior build

it was very cute and made a very charming tinkling noise as the water trickled down which added to the theme of the whole thing.

I did actually really love Princess’s decoration – I don’t think she got enough credit for how good the leaves on her trees actually looked or how well the illustrations were done

the bowls had a lot of personality to them and the whole concept reminded me A LOT of the illustrations in Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet & Allan Ahlberg, a book I was obsessed with as a kid

the drip effect around the rim may not have worked and the podiums not being decorated were a pity but I think she can be proud of the bowls themselves.

An Unofficial Water Feature Ranking
1. Jan’s Angy Warrior Cat
2. Donna’s Book of Genesis
3. Cadi’s German Woodland Fanfiction
4. Dave’s Boujie Dentist Accessory
5. Steve’s Beautiful Sensory Nightmare
6. Dan’s Sleep Paralysis Demon That Is First In My Heart
7. Sophie’s Caprese Salad Fairies
8. Princess’s One Specific Aerial View

Jan consistently Fari-ing herself by doing terrible in one challenge and then unarguably having one of the best main makes needs to be studied because she should’ve been Potter of the Week this time but she tried to cram a hedgehog into a space barely big enough for 5 millionaires to look at the Titanic in and because Steven won that particular challenge and had a solid main make, he was Potter of the Week

and for the elimination, the writing was on the wall throughout the edit for Princess and while there was a lot to like about her piece, and everything else she’s made, it felt like she wasn’t quite fitting what the show, as a brand, wants from their Potters and she was let go this week

she has a beautiful style that thrives on simplicity and elegance and because this is a TV show, they kind of require a little more bombast and unhinged photorealistic snake energy. But if you want to carry on seeing what Princess is making, you can follow her on Instagram at Princess_Fingall.

And so, 7 Potters make their way into Tea Week(?)