it could be a castle

Next Sunday evening there will be no new blog post, because Mike and I will be two days into the week-long workshop that we are teaching! At this point, every feeling filling me up is the purest extract of excitement - no nervousness or stress thus far, a good sign.

This past weekend there was a "FARM TOUR" going on in this area of North Carolina. It's like a big farm open house, and people drive from farm to farm, picking and choosing the ones that they wish to see. On Saturday we had 400+ people come by! Sunday was more of the same. So it was a good opportunity for Mike and I to answer a lot of questions, and talk about Cob, and explain our design strategies... a good guinea-piggish run-through of what we'll be experiencing for 8 days straight next week.

Today was big, because we finished up the stone work! And I have the photos to prove it.




That's pretty much what it looks like now. The North (back) wall is about 5 1/2 feet high at some points, and sturdy as a mountain goat's tendon matrix. The stones on that back wall are BIG. Some I'd imagine would tip the scales at around 250 or 300 pounds. After a combination of pickup-trucking some to the site, and rolling others up from the woods, it was time to try "the method" (with stones that I just couldn't lift off the ground, not even a nano-inch).


The method worked. I got 3 enormous rocks across the trench and onto the wall using a stick-bridge, and without any falling down onto my toes. However, at one point I was using little "chinker" rocks to stabilize a big guy, and the big guy had a friend balanced on top of him, and the friend (an isosceles triangle with a sharp point) took a jump into the side of my head. A quick trip to the ice-box, and some quick mental arithmetic success left me feeling fine.

I love the complex pattern of shapes, shadows, and planes that the marriage of rock wall + sunlight provides for us:


Here is "Yoga Mike" testing the holding power of a bridge-stone:


Here is some additional detail work on the interior exposed hearth wall. The cob will just drip around all these little chunky stones, like melting chocolate on a pearl necklace:


Most of my Sunday was spent filling in the gap between the two faces of stone that we layed on-edge. The main filler was our trusty sand-clay mortar. To save on mortar, create some insulation value, and salvage materials, I raided the recycling bin and integrated some bottles and styrofoam into the filler:



The (glass) bottles themselves aren't any good for insulation, but the pockets of air that they create will be.

On to a week of tying up loose-ends before the workshop participants arrive and demand their money's worth of learning. I'm looking forward to a visit from my good friend Jeremy Curtiss, a fellow Industrial Design graduate. He'll be coming up Thursday or Friday and staying on through the workshop to be an assistant teacher, and help document the project. He'll also be trying to find himself, I'd imagine, and what better place than this?