Alt. Build Blog: 2015

Monday, December 28, 2015

It was over 3 years ago we made our cardboard solar cooker

as a prototype for a more permanent cooker as we profiled in the post:

This past spring we finally made the permanent one (above).

We adopted the plans from:

and plans included in the 1992 book,

Cooking With The Sun (Morning Sun Press)

by Beth and Dan Halacy.

(As an aside, as I was researching for this post

I noticed that Beth Halacy died earlier this year,

Dan had died some years earlier.

Many thanks to them for there contributions to the passive use of solar energy.)

Now that our adobe wall is just over one year old

I thought it would be nice to give a look at how the adobe plaster has held up.

We had couple of hard driving rains this past summer

and as expected they left a nice texture to the plaster

but also washed off much of the pigment in the exposed designs.

All of the posts to date are:

In this post of our series I want to take a look at how we plastered the wall

and Allison will explain how she and her sisters made the designs, such as you see above,

out of adobe mud and mineral pigments.

In the photo above Cynthia used caliche, a clay slip, and oxides on her burrowing owl

with earring eyes hiding under the Mexican Hat flowers Allison created earlier.

All of the posts to date are: