Handprint Press

  • About Hand Print Press
  • Art
    • spoons & wood
    • stories: building, earth, arts
    • oven stories
    • music & more
    • Kiko’s gallery
    • food
  • Tech
    • oventek
    • stovetek
  • Bookstore
  • Workshops

Bottle insulation for a yurt floor

March 18, 2014

Rusty Orner, of Quiet Creek Farm, in PA, took the idea of insulating an oven floor with recycled beer bottles and applied it to a yurt he was building as a classroom and bunk space for students and interns. On leveled ground, they made a rubble trench, covered with gravel bags and capped with mortar and slate, to support the lattice walls of the yurt. They filled the thirty foot diameter donut with packed shale, a thin layer of sand, and then 5,000 beer bottles. The empty bottles provide four inches of insulation and a thermal break to keep cold from migrating into the floor. Rusty . . .

Read the Post

1 Comment · building tech, stories: building, earth, arts, Tech, the work of art

Hug Hut at Muddy Creek School, Philomath

May 24, 2012

Muddy Creek charter school in Philomath commissioned this mud project as the initial step in creating an "outdoor classroom." All 60 kids, K-5, participated in 2 days of playdough brainstorming and design, and six days of mud. Parents and neighbors contributed random prunings of willow, fruitwood, and forsythia that we wove into a rough hut; the mud came up out of a hole in the ground, and we ended up making a lovely cob bench and this "hug hut." The hut was designed to "last" for just one winter, and then get torn down so new students could make their own -- instead of taking care of . . .

Read the Post

Leave a Comment · building tech, stories: building, earth, arts, Tech, the work of art

Mud Mural at Colorado State University Pueblo, with Kiko Denzer

May 21, 2012

Maya Aviña teaches fine arts at CSU in Pueblo, Colorado. For about the past ten years, she’s been immersed in natural building, which she has also made into the focus of her research at the college. Last year, she invited me to come be an “artist in residence” and do a mural project. The challenge was to bring life into dead space: a bleak, harsh, hard-edged, institutional (college) courtyard of grey and yellow concrete pressed down by massive, overhanging soffit walls of more cast concrete. It looked (and felt) like a pen in a zoo designed so the animals below couldn’t . . .

Read the Post

1 Comment · Kiko's gallery, stories: building, earth, arts, the work of art

Newer Posts
Older Posts

Blog Categories

Categories

  • announcements, classes, opportunities (11)
  • Books (2)
  • Documents (3)
  • Tech (52)
    • building tech (13)
    • oventek (27)
    • stovetek (16)
  • the work of art (61)
    • food (5)
    • Kiko's gallery (8)
    • music & more (13)
    • oven stories (15)
    • spoons & wood (8)
    • stories: building, earth, arts (19)
  • Uncategorized (1)

recent comments

  • Ken Peek, Amazon on Make a Ray Jacobs Rocky Mountain Dulcimer
  • Sue M., Amazon on Make a Ray Jacobs Rocky Mountain Dulcimer
  • W. Todd Isaac, Amazon on Make a Ray Jacobs Rocky Mountain Dulcimer
  • Manya M., Amazon on Make a Ray Jacobs Rocky Mountain Dulcimer
  • Steve Murphy, Amazon on Make a Ray Jacobs Rocky Mountain Dulcimer

Search our site

Copyright © 2025 · Simply Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in