This is one example of many projects found in the book The Best of Making Things - A Hand Book of Creative Discovery. Find out more about the book! You wil need: 8 strips of wooden lath (or cut a wooden yardstick) - small nails - hammer - window screening - staple gun - dry vegetable fibers (such as corn husks, onion skins, celery strings, sawdust, weeds, or straw) - scissors -blender - paper towels, napkins, paper bags, newspaper or tissue - dishpan - newspaper - sponge - iron. Make 2 wooden frames the same size (any size that fits in a dishpan). Staple a piece of window screen onto . . .
Guest Article: An Earthen Oven Odyssey by Joe Kennedy
I have been making earthen ovens for over twenty years now. I made my first one in 1991 when I was working with architect Nader Khalili at CalEarth in the Mojave Desert. We were making a lot of adobe bricks at the time (friendly Persian-sized ones – 8â€x8â€x2â€) and also building domes of regular fired bricks. I’m not sure what got it into my brain to make an oven, probably an old picture of the ovens at Taos Pueblo. One day I made a round foundation of adobe bricks in a mud mortar bed right on the ground, then hammered a string in the middle and used that as a guide to lay up a . . .
Low-Relief Mudwork
I cut these low-relief directly into wet mud smeared on sheetrock panels. After they are finished (and dry), I apply colored washes, which also make the surface more durable. Click on the thumbnail to see the entire image, uncropped. They range in size from about 16 x 24 inches to the big mural, which is about 8 x 20 feet. All were part of an installation/show at the Bush Barn Gallery in Salem, OR, in 2004. Note the wall made of temporary gallery wall panels that we assembled into a gateway, covered with cardboard, and then plastered with mud. The finger pattern was copied directly from a . . .