Carole Crews approaches natural building as an artist. Drawing from tradition and her own experiments she is able to use many of the same materials in the studio and on the construction site to create luscious surfaces, As a girl making mud pies in an old adobe village near Taos, New Mexico, she never imagined that her play would lead to a career, but after earning her degree in art at U.T. Austin and participating in an adobe building project in 1975, she discovered the compelling nature of clay surfaces and their possibilities as an artistic medium as well. She collaborated with the late Lori Lawyer in 1990 to start "Gourmet Adobe" and has also built an adobe dome with additions west of Taos which offers ample opportunities for ongoing experiments.

Carole has taught at Natural Building Colloquia for the last decade and contributed to several books including The Art of Natural Building and Alternative Construction; Contemporary Natural Building Methods. She is currently working on a book of her own and seeking a publisher.

During the summer of 2005 Kindra and Chris had the privilege of helping plastering guru Carole Crews with an addition to her adobe home near Taos, NM. We learned a bunch. Despite Carole's retirement ambitions we immediately started scheming ways to create more opportunities to gather from her experience. Conveniently, we had a good sized earthen building under construction not far from Taos that was in need of plastering and finishes toward the end of 2006 summer. Therefore we matched instructor with site and invited interested people to join in.

Our site encompassed an 800 sqft floor plan prepared in several phases of plastering. We expected to move each section forward one phase including: wall preparation, one-coat plaster, finishes and artistic sculpturing. A half day field trip will provide us with a taste of the thousand year living tradition of earthen plasters in Taos, NM.

DURATION: 6 days
COST: $600 ($550 early registration), limited work trade available