Taos Plaster Workshop Part IV

Leslie working on the dragons

Learning about sparkles and colors to add to plaster.

Our last lunch together

Galen applying manure plaster

Plaster made from clay from our land.  Isn't it pretty?  Carole said our clay is so fine and such high quality it could be sold for makeup.  Galen and Ken were quick to point out we could just go out in the yard and get what we needed for our faces from now on.

Note the completed bottle wall and addition of a snake in progress to the wall where this series of photos began.

Taos Plastering Workshop Part III

An experiment with coloring the plaster.

Still drying.

Dry.

The noseeums were nasty and one bit Bonnie right under the eye so she plastered it, too.

Mixing manure into the plaster.  Ewww!  This goes on outside walls and doesn't smell.  What the manure does is cause a chemical reaction that makes the layer strong.

Hard at work making repairs.

Wish I had a good before photo.  Dawn did a great job with this.

Carole cooked really good meals for us but in this photo she is mixing up a batch of wheat paste for plaster.  There are so many ways to make plaster, color it, and decorate with it.

Taos Plastering Workshop Part II

This is the entrance to the Three Peaks area where Carole's house is located.

Building Codes?  What are those?  There is a bit of everything here.

This isn't a bad looking building except for the truck built into one side of it.

Creative fencing.

This place had recently burned to the ground and was still smoking when we went by.

Carole's place is at the top of this hill. Rocks were so large on this last part of the road that one of the students got an axle on her truck hung up on one and had to get the truck jacked up and off it.

Two of the three peaks.

Taos Plastering Workshop Part I

We went to a plastering workshop given by Carole, the queen of plastering.  She built this adobe house and uses it as a workshop for students.  We spent three days here learning how to make different plasters and which type of plaster to use where.

The kitchen

Building a bottle wall.

The wall is being built just high enough to keep the weather out of an outdoor room.

Galen helping with the finishing touches.

The first layers of plaster have a lot of straw in them.

This is a sample of our soil and it shows a very fine clay that is perfect for a finishing indoor plaster.

One of the students in the class and her husband are building an earthbag home not too far away so we went to see it after the workshop one day.

Galen repairing a window.

A close up of the earthbag construction.  Galen is talking to Joe, the owner, about how much work this was.

Back to Carole's place.  This is the hot tub area at the end of the outdoor room.

Another view of the hot tub.  It is heated by a wood fire.

A sleeping nook inside the house.

A bathroom across the road from the house.