10/10 herpetologists would not recommend.

The puzzle jug really fell out of favour after we invented the straw, huh?

Jug-saw Puzzles

This week it’s Jugs Week in the Pottery, not be confused with Jugs Weekly, the now defunct BabeStation Periodical. For their main make, the potters were making Puzzle Jugs. What’s a Puzzle Jug? Apparently the audience at home was mystified (courtesy of Liam on BlueSky)

the Puzzle Jug is a jug with a highly pierced collar that makes it impossible to pour any liquid out of and instead works by having to suck the water out via the hollow handle and a hidden spout. Which, in my eyes, immediately makes it Not A Jug™ and is instead some sort of silly straw sippy cup.

Given the whole point of the Puzzle Jug is to trick and deceive, it’s no real surprise that we ended up with the Great British Snake Off

no, the OTHER Great British Snake Off between Kayleigh, Mark and Elham who all had serpentine motifs going on with their jugs. But the true snake in the grass will always be Siobhan who is firmly in her husband-stealing horny era

oh, she has A TYPE

bearded, reliable, a Mark by any other name

truly the Romeo and Juliet of our time.

Mark was of course one of the potters treading amongst the snake pit of a jug challenge, his being the most impersonal of the three

much like any book Philip Pullman has ever written (read another book, the biblical edition), it feels vaguely like an allegory for the Book of Genesis. Kayleigh and Elham had gone for my more personal takes on the snake which is catnip to this show. If we’re not learning new and intriguing factoids about your life every week through the medium of kitsch pottery chachkis, I’m afraid they will not waste any time in releasing the hounds.
Elham’s, titled to The Sober Serpent (my favourite DC Superhero) was inspired by HER HUSBAND (get your own, Siobhan) and the fact he doesn’t drink and was born in The Year of the Snake

as someone who paid £50 for this name, I love the Hydra-like look and I think I’d have gone for a similar take with my all-time favourite D&D nonsense monster, The Goose Hydra

fighting the biblically accurate horrible goose is a rite of passage at my tables.

Kayleigh’s takes on the snake was inspired by the allotment that her family took over from her granddad and the fact they have adders nesting in the area

and the jug is only half the puzzle, the rest of it is a vegetable guessing game

it’s giving “So close!! that is a shape 💕”

but snakes weren’t the only familiarly trodden ground as Whitney and Fynn turned up to the pottery with nigh on the same nautical design

if this ever happened to me on this show I would throw myself down the perilous Gladstone staircase IMMEDIATELY. Both of them were going for very tricky handles – the twisted rope effect making it even harder to guarantee the required hollow

and it was already a difficult enough challenge if the end results of this episode are anything to go by. I personally think it ended up seemingly like maybe this would’ve been better as a challenge in Week 6 or 7 – don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t d-

sorry to the parents who assumed this blog was a safe space, that coin toss is becoming mighty weighted, innit?

Emily’s Puzzle Jug was harkening back to Scotland’s rich history of illegal whisky distilling

and Andrew was taking a similar route with his own adventures in Semi-legal Drinking

his design was a take on Sir John Barleycorn, a mythological figure who serves as the personification of the barley and beer brewed from it. In the poems about him he usually suffers numerous indignities and controversies – which I believe makes him canonically the first ever Demon Twink. Andrew however was going for a much more distinguished take on Barleycorn

he usually looks like Nina West during a design challenge

Angharad was also taking a medieval slant on her puzzle jug, designing the whole thing to be her brother’s family tree, dead guinea pig and all

we don’t talk about the other one hamster that got written out of the will (Rian Johnson, I’ve got a new and unique mystery for Benoit Blanc to solve)

there was absolutely no way that Angharad wasn’t winning this episode – a memorial guinea pig portrait on the side of an absurd jug is truly the sort of unique occurence that can only flourish in this specific ecosystem. Like those Adelie penguins that use pebbles to propose to one another…

OH SHE DEFINITELY HAS A TYPE

I don’t know when this show became Pottr, Siobhan’s personal dating app

BUT HERE WE ARE.

As well as being newly themed around the awful lot of explaining he has to do to his wife, Naveed’s puzzle jug was an ode to his mother and the 7 children she had to raise as a single parent

it’s incredibly poignant and I’ve boxed myself into a corner with no way of whimsically transitioning (some would say my speciality) into Bill doing an impression of a fatigued bee

there was not a single mention of biscuits this week and I worry that they’re not feeding Bill correctly. They didn’t even use the blindfolded throwdown challenge to make him blind taste test biscuits – shove a Jaffa Cake in there and watch the discourse squirm! I refuse to believe there aren’t at least 3 “Bee-scuit” puns lying on the cutting room floor

I really liked Bill’s design and the honeycomb puncturing being a really clever way of accentuating it. The riddle might need a little more work “suck” and “suck it” don’t rhyme quite as well as “Beware” and “Care”.

They’re Blind You!

The Second Challenge of the week was the time honoured tradition of the blindfolded throwing challenge. The subject this week being a Victorian Vase with elegant shoulders and an extended neck, which is why Elizabeth Debicki keeps getting locked in whenever she visits one of the National Trust’s stately homes

I’ve been successfully peer pressured into watching the first series of The Night Manager and my favourite character is Elizabeth Debicki’s neck (a complete scene stealer) and I can only assume it’s going to go about as well for her as Fynn’s first attempt at blindfolded vase throwing given the show’s penchant for grievous neck trauma

on top of throwing everything blindfolded, they also had to choose the stronger of the two vases while blindfolded. If they could find them

the spirits screaming at Whitney that he just needs to go a little more to the left to avoid the looming menace in the background

but while the Ghosts of Gladstone guided Whitney to a perfectly respectable 5th place, Andrew’s Grandmother apparently has some bones to pick from the spirit realm

he did still manage to beat both Elham and Kayleigh, the latter of which had to stumble off into the distance to get a prescription for Prochlorperazine before the Victorian Vase becomes a Victorian barf bucket

she genuinely looked like she was going to throw up THE NEXT DAY

on the other end of the spectrum, Fynn won out with what is unarguably the most vase-shaped vase of the bunch

my personal favourite of the entire challenge was Emily’s rejected vase that looked like it had eaten a tyre

she narrowly beat Andrew and the aforementioned practical joke from beyond the grave.

It was a close race between Bill and Fynn the Pottery Men with Bill taking second place behind Fynn. Joining the two of them on the Blindfolded Podium was Naveed and his Victorian Jacuzzi for Mice

Mark just missed out on the medal ceremony and unfortunately for him the coin had been tossed and this would not be a week where the Throwdown Challenge mattered all that much.

An Official Blindfolded Jug Ranking:
1. Fynn’s First Billing
2. The Second Bill-ing
3. What Is This? A Jacuzzi FOR ANTS?
4. Mark’s Unredemptive Fourth Place
5. Whitney’s Fifth Place Hi-Jinkies!
6. Angharad’s Contained Containers
7. Emily’s De-necking
8. Thanks For Nothing, Grandma
9. Elham’s Jar-shaped Vases
10. Kayleigh’s Personal High G-Force Test

Don’t Jug Me I’m Scared

Hardly anyone’s jugs came back from the initial firing unscathed, ultimately leading the challenge to be more of a race to have the least damage and my heart broke for Mark as whichever camera operator has a sixth sense for disaster and tracked this slow dolly zoom into him breaking his handle

but despite the mishandling of the handle, the judges had plenty to praise about the main body of the jug – I do greatly enjoy The Bumblebee of Woe

they did think it should’ve been more obviously pierced, however I quite like the piercings being partially obscured by the trees, I think it adds to the deceptiveness of the jug and certainly gives the whole thing a good depth. It was however, the only one that the judges flatout refused to put water into

which is pretty galling considering that Andrew’s bottom was in tatters

however, if you blew into it before the water all leaked out, it did in fact work which only really adds to the perplexing nature of the puzzle jug

the judges had to blow instead of suck because of any potential debris trapped in the handle and Keith isn’t being paid enough to do any pre-watershed sucking.
Andrew also had the glazing going for him, as he really managed to pull off that look of a knick knack you only ever really see in a Toby Carvery

it also looks astonishingly like Charles Dance if a witch turned him into a piece of crockery

but I might #have a very specific brand of facial blindness in which I just think anything with a face looks like Charles Dance because I also thought this looked like him if he was playing Rum Tum Tugger in Cats

my pattern recognition is broken, I’ve got Charles Dance Mania.

The only other potter to have a leak was Emily

but much like Andrew she was really winning the judges over with her glazing work – I’ve never felt such a kindred spirit with a sheep in my life

never email me because this is invariably how it finds me.
I do wish they’d given her more time to explain the various illustrations because they’re very specific and obviously mean something within the context of the bootleg whisky history but without the explanation they do seem a bit random.

Most of the other potters just had a few cracks in their handles that prevented them from being able to suck up any of the liquid unless you covered them. The only one that was both still intact and they couldn’t really get to work was Fynn’s but my God if he didn’t knock it out of the park with the glazing

I’m very excited for his raku animal sculpture next week because his knack for textural observations are amazing. (*the blog fav graveyard dirge begins playing softly in the background*)

Whitney’s similar concept worked better than Fynn’s however the judges do still want to see him pushing himself a little more in terms of his ambition with the glazing and decorating

and while I get what they mean, I do think the show needs to find a way of embracing and making accommodations for potters who have more of a minimalist and simple style because the build of Whitney’s is honestly incredible – he pulled off that hollow twisted rope and had by far the most pierced collar without sacrificing the integrity of the jug’s structure. I’d be genuinely interested to see what he could do without having to find a way to a make a cântaro themed around the first album he bought as a kid. Although a Mexican musical jug inspired by a bootleg copy of Avril Lavigne’s “Let Go” I bought at the Harare flea market in 2001 might go really hard?

But maybe Whitney also needs to trust in a minimal approach more, because Naveed’s was a really subtle and beautiful piece of pottery that the judges appreciated a lot

I was once again rooting for Naveed to get Potter of the Week; I can complain all I want about having to make sentimental German Humpens with their National Insurance Numbers on them but then someone makes something like Naveed’s that feels very organically personal with the touches dedicated to his mother and the decorative work inspired by the henna patterns he paints on his daughter

and for the briefest moment, we’re back in The Good Timeline with guys just being dudes crying over nice things

but sadly Naveed seems to be the Glenn Close of Gladstone and was just pipped to the post by Angharad’s Familial Hierarchy of Rodents

she did handle the illustration work really well, a distinctly unsung part of this that’s so good is the way the dragon transitions out from being a 3D element into an illustration

and the piercing work to give that celtic knot motif is perfection and really helps sell the the whole piece, much like Bill and his honeycomb puncture marks

I just really love this one, there’s something just delightfully storybook-esque about the warm tones he used and his illustration style he used for the poppies and other floral designs

bees as a motif are slightly played out, which does lend this a very commercial look that I can see some people being a little cold to. But I’m not going to pull a Michelle Visage vs Marie Antoinette and outlaw a tried and tested design choice. Also Bill is my bias, sue me. He reminds me of Merlin the Magical Puppy

Maury, that’s the spirit of a dog trapped inside a man

And we finish with the more successful end of the Spectrum of Serpents – Kayleigh’s was a lot more beautiful and decorative than I had anticipated it being

the small detail of adding the tiny dots around her piercings was so subtle but really elevated the whole thing, as did the different expressions she have the adders – tag yourself, I’m grumpy adder that had to answer 1 phone call

I was just mostly relieved that her pumpkins came out looking a lot more like pumpkins rather than the concerning spread of pustules the illustration readied me for

and while I do love the way Kayleigh’s snakes turned out, I just loved how much more of a focal point Elham’s became

even just the way she positioned the heads of the snakes all slightly differently gives the piece so much life and character. AND she perfectly coordinated them with her earrings?

that’s mother.

An Unofficial Puzzle Jug Ranking:
1. Angharad’s Hamster Inheritance
2. Naveed, The 27 Dresses of Pottery
3. Bill’s Bee-wildering Jug
4. Elham’s Hydrating Hydra
5. Kayleigh’s Pumpkin Puzz-tules
6. Whitney’s Blew Zealand
7. Fynn’s Rum Deal
8. Sir John Barleycorn’s Twink Death
9. Emily’s Leaky History
10. Mark’s Downfall of Eden

I was rooting for Naveed again, but I really can’t argue with Angharad getting Potter of the Week because her design did ultimately come together extremely well and she celebrated by doing the Thriller routine for some reason

and with three of the potters’ jugs failing the first fundamental rule of being a jug, puzzle or none, which is to hold a fluid; Emily, Andrew and Mark were all facing elimination. Sadly Mark’s Garden of Eden was a slightly on the nose narrative as he was the one being cast out

this is not part of my French vanilla fantasy, I will single-handedly launch Pottery Throwdown: Canada Vs The World to see him making pots again on TV. I really saw Mark as a strong contender for the final and I can’t believe we’ve been robbed of 7 more weeks of that glorious beard.

And so 9, get the privilege of taking part in Raku Week