We lived in our yurt and worked on our cob house for eight years. In 2015, we bought a little house in Salem and moved from our little acre in the woods. We did not return for two years. When we did, a bear had been living in the yurt! S/he used the door latch, and moved in!
Someone had come through and stolen everything possible: kitchen doors, planters, lumber, our oven… Without doors on the kitchen the packrats moved in to the walls. We cleaned up as best we could and left, saddened and feeling guilty for neglecting our property. That night we got a call from our neighbor. Someone had stolen the yurt.
When we went out again, the platform the yurt was on, our 16′ round home for 8 years, stood bare among the trees. Immediately, it and the kitchen became the staging area for our final stages of cob construction. We found new motivation to finish the cob dwelling!
Nathan went out everyday and built. I joined him on the weekends and as soon as the walls finally reached the roof, we were collecting ingredients for plaster: kayaking coastal ponds for cattail fluff, taking quick trips to Bob Straub Beach to get one bucket a day of fine spit sand, searching the products at Georgie’s Ceramics Shop and we came up with a recipe.
The first layer, after wetting the wall and adding slip (clay thinned considerably with water), was made of clay from the property, sand from Bob Straub mixed with construction sand, finely chopped straw (lots of it!), and water. We glooped it on with our hands and flexible trowels, then spread it out and smoothed it with plastic disks cut from yogurt/sour cream lids.
Then we added the alis. Alis is natural clay-based paint. We experimented with several ingredients before we landed on our recipe of powdered milk, lime putty, water, cattail fluff, and pigment. The milk solids and the lime react with the clay to make a paint that forms a chemical bond with cob walls. No wetting necessary.
Spider Spring 
