Cobbing with princess feet

After much fuss about the foundation, I finally got my first true cobbing experience. We shoveled some sub-soil onto a tarp, then shoveled on the right ratio of sand. We hosed it down, jumped on, and danced in it barefoot. I quickly discovered that, for me, it is not the easiest dance ever. I had to really push with my legs to mix and smear it and keep from falling over. Furthermore, my tender little feet felt an uncomfortable sensation--cross-between tickling and pain--from all the grit.

After you smear/dance the soil and sand, you grab the tarp on one side and walk it over to the other. This folds the mix over itself. You jump back on for more dancing. Fold, dance, repeat, until the stuff all sticks together in a nice, fatty mud burrito. Then you add straw. You want the straw going in all directions and coated in mud. This dance is more about working it in and not so much smearing.

I stepped hard on a couple rocks, and I was done. Brad, of course, has mighty man legs and hobbit feet so he finished the batch right up. From then on, I have been mixing while wearing rainboots.

When you've got it all mixed properly, you make "cobs" out of it. It's a really delicate procedure where you mush stuff together into mud snowballs. This is where cob building gets its name--"cob" is the old Welsh word for "loaf" (as in loaves of bread). So you take your mud snowball bread loaf things and chuck them to/at your partner who drops them on the wall. You can also just scoop the cob up with a pitchfork and dump it on the wall.

From here you try to smoosh it all together in a wall-like shape. You try to get few/no seams by smearing, poking, etc. I can't do much to describe it for you. It's something that has to be done by feel (a feel reminescent of making those ugly clay pots as a child that your mother loved). You can use a stick to kind of shove all the straw in and "tie it" together. The holes made by the stick help the wall dry out. You leave everything kind of rough so that tomorrow's batch has more surface area to stick to. All in all, it's a pretty straight-forward process that can be a lot of fun. True, the dancing isn't quite as easy as I had imagined. But whenever I get a rock in my foot, I'll think of the alternative--wood, saws, hammers, nails, safety goggles, right angles, MATH--and, well, I'll just grab my rainboots.