We visited two friends in Hotchkiss, Colorado, who are building a home with strawbale walls covered in earthen plaster. We drove up to help them for a couple of days, plastering the interior walls. The first picture shows us mixing cob with our feet (more on that later, as my photos came in out of order, and I can't understand HTML enough to move them).
The second photo shows the builder who is assisting them (his name is Dave, but I haven't learned his last name yet), mixing a batch of cob by hand in a wheelbarrow. The cob was being mixed to stuff into gaps where bales met in order to seal up these thermal breaks before applying the plaster. Cob (in this case) is a mixture of straw and clay slip. Clay slip is just a mixture of earth that has a high percentage of clay (directly from their site) and water.
Mixing the cob in a wheelbarrow is a slow process though, so we learned two other methods. One is to spread the straw on a tarp, slop some clay slip onto it, and mix it with your bare feet (shown in first photo). At first, you get this "yuch!!!" feeling, as your brain interprets the warm, mushy mixture as if you were treading in a fresh cow patty, then you get used to it, and then it's just plain fun.
The third method, the fastest, was to take the mixture on the tarp, and roll the tarp back and forth, mixing it. This is often called the "burrito method", as shown in the photo below.
The last picture is Linc, really getting into his work. For plastering, we used a wooden float, which Linc is holding up.
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