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

Dirt!, the Movie

(Just to let ya'll know I have been trying to watch some movies to help with my motion sickness & seizure problem before I have to move to my new house... I don't know if it's working.)

So this movie arrived in my mailbox called DIRT! and even though after watching Into The Wild the other night and swearing off all drama, documentaries, tear jerkers etc --- I was tempted to go ahead and watch what I thought would not make me cry. I was wrong.

Let me just say this movie goes through 3 cycle plot points, and here is my summary of what they are:

#1. Ya' find out what dirt really is and all the cool awesome things it does (like filtering all water on earth, feeding us, being pieces of fallen stars...) - by the end of this first cycle you are so crushed on dirt you want to marry it. (One guy in the movie feels the same way, cause he licks it.)

#2. Ya' find out modern man has no respect for dirt, or understanding that without dirt we die. Period. And hence the violent, tragic visuals explode across the screen. (This is where the movie took my breathe away, turned my stomach, I stifled crying, and got abdominal cramps from the stress of reality.) ---(FYI: some of my reaction might be related to PMS though.)

#3. Redemption on a small scale. In fact, as awesome as the last cycle of the movie is of showing ways to make positive changes, ways that work, stories to inspire (cool programs in jails where inmates garden)... my abdominal cramps didn't go away though because the destruction was bigger, more massive, faster and more jarring THEN what we are doing to fix things. Still, this part of DIRT! is uplifting and ends on a good note.

WHAT THIS MOVIE MADE ME THINK:::
That I need to get solar panels right away and stop using electricity. I wish so bad I had enough money. So what really needs to happen is solar & other alternative energies need to be affordable, and all mass scale farming needs to be changed over to a method that won't eventually lead to starvation. ~~~~

This will sound dorky but is entirely true - when I was growing up in suburban New Orleans (Harahan HAwks Baby!) I was a bit obsessed with dirt. More then a normal child because my mom has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which mostly manifested itself in cleaning. Not just regular cleaning, I am talking you could eat off the floors, do surgery on the kitchen counter, lick the bottom of the tub, and drink the water in the toilet sort of "clean". Think museum meets open heart surgery. Back then she thought dirt was the cause of everything that could ail a human being and we were scarcely allowed to touch it, play in it, or mention it(wonda' why i have auto immune?) - it was the evil thing that kept my mom dust mopping and vacuuming 10 times a day.

But I loved dirt. I could not help myself and everyday I would sneak over to the side of our house where dirt still existed in the shade of a neighbor's pecan tree, and i would dig holes. Diggin' holes was my favorite thing to do because I wanted to see when I would hit water or China, and which one I would hit first. One time I even stopped my school principle in the hallway with a dire important question I had been waiting to ask her (the smartest lady eva' of course cause she was even bossing teachers around), I got a hold of her arm and asked with urgancy "how far do i have to dig before i hit water?" and she said "6 feet"... and I believed her.

This is when bad things began happening to my parents cable and electric lines, because I began digging those wires up to get them out of the way of my digging till I hit water project. When i failed to ever hit 6 feet with my hand shovel, I just said F' it, I am filling these holes up with hose water.
Hence my dad banging the cable box and screaming at the TV.

BTW- I even ate dirt once when i was a kid cause i thought, Why Not??? I got worms and had to take some sick pink medicine from the doctor.

OK- did I digress?

PS_ I am going to donate this movie to the madison county (NC) library... hopefully it doesn't give other peeps stress cramps too.

xoxo

Eco Peeve Friday: Being So Tired I Can't Be Peeved

What really annoys me today is that I am soooooo tired I could not rev up enough chutzpah to write about anything that truly peeves me off. Oh and how long the eco peeve list is, but how nice the grass and sun were as I laid there motionless. Sorry, instead of crusading to save the earth today, I just laid on it and took a rest :)
PS- Here is a photo of the new "stop wars" tank, maybe you can wear this and casually warp the minds of pro-war people who love Star Wars, to come over to the 'peace side'.