Playing With Cob! (A Mosaic Adventure)

Cob is a mixture of subsoil (clay), sand, and some kind of fiber (like hay) that makes a kind of hard cement when it dries. Growing up in the city of New Orleans "cob" meant the snot in your nose that you coughed up and spit out, usually referring to spitting a 'cob' on people or near them. It still takes me off guard when I hear the word 'cob' now used to refer to the sustainable and ancient building material that is being handmade all over the world as an alternative to the inefficient building materials of the modern (cheap) human. Cob produces thermal mass, and all kinds of other fancy words that mean it has some awesome natural qualities in controlling temperature in your home.
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My cob project was to build a fire code safe platform underneath my wood stove. When I moved to the Luck Cabin there were just some haphazardly placed bricks under the hot box, and they didn't come out near far enough to prevent fires caused when the sparks fly out the wood stove door (this usually happens while putting in new logs like Hickory which throw off many hot flamin' sparks.)
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With the wooden frame set in, I was ready for my cob expert friend Mary Jane to come over and help me get the project started!
Mary Jane and her special man built their WHOLE HOUSE outta cob. Seriously! There is no better teacher then experience, Mary Jane knew her shit about the mixture and what consistency we were aiming for. Sticky, ooky, gooky, bloppy.
We used clay dug up at my house (when my grey water system & mini barn were put in), sand (some i stole from a secret place and some mary jane brought), and the magic ingredient ......
DONKEY POOP! yay!
Here is the equation broken down::::
clay + sand + donkey poo + water = sticky heavy cob worth throwin' down.
We mixed it up in this big storage bucket with our hands. Mary did alot of mashing, pushing it down with her fist, turning it over and over. Adding water, adding sand. Checking the feel of the cob.
I pushed it around, flipped it and kept talking cause i was so excited.

Once the cob mixture was feeling right, we started tossing it down into the wooden frame bordering the wood stove...

We filled in all the spaces, and used our hands to sculpt it flat and smooth on top...

Can you believe how awesome that looks!? We don't need no cement, we need only found Al' NaturAl' materials!

GETTING ARTSY WITH THE COB::::

I wanted to decorate my cob with lots of broken plates, glass, and beads. I can say from past experience it tends to crack more with lots of close together decorations, but Mary Jane said all cob cracks, you just want to reduce the amount of cracking to a minimum. She also noted that with cracks, you can just fill them in with more cob later.

The artist in me could not resist a full out mosaic assault on my cob platform. I didn't know what I wanted to do so I started with a simple border made from glass beads I've carried around for years (called "mass of glass" at craft stores, it's the reject 'ugly' glass beads sold in a big tub.)

I wanted to do some kind of bird too, and after Mary J looked around the Luck Cabin she noticed I had alot of owls... her suggestion led to some majorly scary fun! I was so scared to fuck it up but then it started really coming together as we collaborated on the owl's features...

Since the cob was setting up slightly (due to the wood stove actually cranking out some wood burnin' heat) I was adding some water to keep it wet and using the back of a heavy kitchen knife to 'tap' in the tiles evenly. We also used a paint brush dipped in water to run over all the tiles to smooth out the cob and fill in cracks. This covered the tiles in a muddy wet coating that can be removed with a sponge AFTER it dries.

Mary J went home to work on her own cob stove project... and I became obsessed for hours making the mosaic more and more elaborate.

.-.-.-.--.--.--.-.--.-.-hypnotizing.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

This project was so much fun I can not wait to do my next cob idea, which will be to take my old broken wood stove sitting out on my porch and build a cob oven around it!

but it'll have to wait till Spring time when it's warm cause nobody wants to stick their hands in frozen sticky mud. ;)

XOxoxox

Animal Tracking: Bobcat & Wild Turkey

Can hardly see it huh? Neither could I. As I was walking I began to stare to my right at the smooth clay & silt where rain had drained down the side of a mountain road, I imagined how nice some tracks would look in that perfectly smooth mud...
then I saw it.
Bobcat tracks.
One after another in a staight line, wide apart and shaped with such perfection that it left no doubt as to what had left it. No claw marks, large pads, feline shape... (see track info & drawings HERE)....
A bobcat moving upward along the road, moving towards some turkey feathers and...

...wild turkey tracks (see pic below)! You can almost see the scene unfolding, like a dream of something to happen, already happened, to always happen. The hunt. The cat trailing the bird in hunger, in play and power.

Xoxoxo

Eco Art: Earth Clay & Rabbit Poo Part 2

This is NOT a big cookie ya'll! It's just more clay and rabbit scat.... and that's not chocolate chips I stuck on top there either, it's broken glass. But doesn't it look delicious, huh ? :)

I am loving making stuff out of the clay in the ground by my house and with rabbit poop! Only problem is I have run out of rabbit poop since I was just finding it out in the field (I don't have a rabbit.) I may have to walk down the road to the sheep, goat and Llama farms and ask for poo... will be a great way to meet some neighbors. ;)

I got a cool idea from Bort when he brought me some small circular hanging ornaments he had made from similar materials (sand, clay and horse dookie), but he had pressed glass into it! I really loved the look and idea so that is now the style I am working on.
All the materials for this project were utterly 100% FREE (as in no $ money $ spent) and no chemicals what-so-ever are involved. The glass was collected for recycling and was broken into pieces. Since I don't have any sand on hand to use, this project is considered COB and not POTTERY. (Thanks Panne for explaining the difference!)

Whatever it is, it's gonna be pretty when it dries solid and i can wipe off each pretty piece of glass! So far it sat over night and did not crack. The small places where i could tell it was pulling the day before I made sure to watch closely and fix early on.

YAY for earth friendly art!
XoXoxox

DIY:Rabbit Poo & Earth Clay Pottery

I get really excited when I think about making any kind of art supply/craft with stuff right outside my house for free, earth friendly & simple. So when I was told I could make some pottery with dried rabbit poop (alternately bone dry horse or cow poop) and some clay-ish soil dug from the ground I could not wait to get my hands on this project! So here is the 100% natural, chemical free, and old world process I tried out ::::

Gathering Supplies:

You will need to find some kind of super duper dried up poop of a grass/plant eating animal - and some dirt. The more hard clay the dirt is the better and easier to begin with. Sand can also be added to this project but I didn't have any, so I tried it without.

Gathering rabbit poop takes a while cause it's not exactly huge, but I knew a spot in a open area where I'd seen bunches of scat and tried filling up my can.... You'll want as much as you can get cause the more the poop the more malleable the clay will be.
Then I went to a spot I had found some clay a few inches under the black soil, it was a yellow/tan/brown colored clay.

Setting Up A Work Space:

I took a bench and set up a pile of the clay on a piece of wood I could knead the clay on, a plate of water for wetting the clay, and the rabbit poop to be crushed/powdered.
The Process:

I put the rabbit scat in a bowl and took a rough stone to crush it into a powder. The poop has to be super dry for this to work good.

In mortar and pedestal fashion, the poop will become a powder that you will need to add bit by bit to the clay.
I added it in slowly, kneading in the rabbit scat and water to keep it wet. The clay-ish dirt went from cracking and hard to work with to becoming a slimy traditional clay that was easy to shape and play with. More poop seems to mean more awesome!
Just like store bought clay, ya gotta roll it, mash it, move it, work it over and over to get it the right consistency. Also working out air bubbles.
I added water to keep if from cracking often... (i wonder if the sand would help with binding it together also???)
Pretty rad, right? Went from dirt in the ground to a ball of clay ready to be the whim of human imagination or functionality.
I decided to make a small simple coil pot, starting with a round slab - I didn't want to get in depth till i learned out the clay would work and dry...
Coil pots are jus' rolling out little snakes, and coiling them upward...
Then you can smooth the coil together with wet hands, to make the sides flat.
YAY! little pot. Tiny pot! Poop pot! Lovely pot!
I played around with making marks on it too with my knife (see below).

THE NEXT DAY:

So the next day my pot was rock hard, and I don't think it was even nearly all the way dry. First I am experimenting with sun drying, and then I would like to later throw it on a fire and hope it doesn't explode. But there was a problem already..........
It freakin' CRACKED on tha' bottom. shit. . . . . Nothing a little more clay can't fill in though.
What'dya say, that this DIY eco art project is a 90% success and 10% fail ? Seems 100% amazing to me regardless of the end result.
And, it still looks good from far away. ;)
Xoxoxox