Getting Ready for the Fall Art Tour

I've worked the last couple of weeks sawmilling and installing hardwood flooring for my friend.


I have to say sawmilling is a great job for me: beautiful settings, good low stress physical work, and at the end of the day you get as many slabs as you can haul. What more could you ask for?

I've taken this week off to prepare for the the Fall Art Tour. We've got a lot of cleaning up to do to make our studio and barn presentable. We're also taking on a fairly serious landscaping project.... Nothing like the last minute.

We put in our walk way right after our house was finished. Over time all the new dirt continued to settle and our brick border slowly disappeared. So we went back and rescued all the red bricks.


Lots of bricks! At some point the first bricks settled down out of view and instead of redoing the walk way we simply placed another layer of red bricks down on top of the old ones.

So I've been looking into various ways to build retaining walls as our kiln could really use some good retaining walls. We've became interested in earthen bag construction during our research. Eathen bag construction is just what it sounds like. Bags (woven polypropylene bags: sandbags, feedbags, etc ...) filled with earth stacked up and then covered with a stucco to keep them from deteriorating in the sun. Barbed wire is used between the bags to keep them from shifting.


They probably aren't the most practical choice for edging a walkway, as they are quite a bit of work. They are cheap though. We're using them for our walkway as these will tie into a retaining wall around our parking lot which we hope to expand before this weekend.

Still have a ways to go.

In other earthen/clay related news I'm testing out different clay mixtures for making bricks.

We might fill our kiln with handmade bricks at some point in the near future. More on that latter though.

It's raining right now which doesn't help my chances of completing all the landscaping I'm hoping to do before Friday, but we'll see what we can get done. I'll post again in the near future with some more pots from our most recent firing, along with a photo or two of Ray Hamilton who will be joining us this weekend as our guest artist.
take care
Joe