image gallery

Sculptural plaster in our daughter’s straw bale bedroom. Earthen plaster with a wheat paste topcoat for durability.

Teeny library cottage on the Mud Dauber campus

Our dining area and community space during workshops

Moon Cottage on the Mud Dauber campus

An earthen plastered bedroom, in our straw bale home

bookshelf out of cob, with coats of lime plaster

The Heartwood and Sapwood cottages, with the new cob and strawbale garden walls, in different stages of completion.

the dining building, in progress

The original cottage at Mud Dauber School. It was constructed in 2014, completely with cob (no framing, and no straw bales!). It has only gotten a couple coats of pigmented lime wash on the outside, but we are hoping to finalize the outside finishing details in 2020.

interior of the Cattail Cottage - clay plasters, and earthen floor

We wanted some more color in this bathroom, so we added a green-pigmented clay alis paint, over the existing plaster.

the dock + shade structure at our pond - built with roundwood from our forest and locally-milled cedar, and constructed with mostly just a chainsaw and hammer, it has been serving us since 2013.

permitted strawbale cottage in Chapel Hill, NC

a workshop group from 2017 taking a campus tour past the Cattail Cottage

a greenhouse/bathhouse hybrid building, with many different wall systems: cob, straw bale, slip-straw, wattle-and-daub, form cob, straw braids, bamboo, etc… 2017 workshop

the greenhouse side of our greenhouse/bathhouse hybrid structure

Leo brings his legos to play with an impressive cob model made by a student

this curvy cob wall in our addition allowed for us to sculpt build-in shelving really easily (just cut into the cob with a machete when it’s “leather hard”)

roundwood framing for a roof over a new cob oven building site

initial layer of plaster over an insulation layer

building a cob oven

smooth clay plaster

lime plaster and cob shelves in a bathroom

retroactively installing a chimney pipe through a green roof

cutting out cracked areas in a decorative way - preparing for a repair

finish layer of earthen floor repair - next step would be burnishing, then letting dry completely, and then 4 coats of linseed oil

a cozy writing hut for a local author

strawbale writing studio with salvaged windows

embedding metal shelf brackets into the strawbale/plaster wall system

pottery-grade clay finish plaster over a site-clay scratch plaster