Games with sand and colour

Colours from nature

Yesterday was one of those days where the infrastructure fails.  After the second flat tyre and the hole in the wheelbarrow the generator had a hissy-fit that upset the sander, which refused to go again until we plugged it into someone's wall socket (whereupon it coughed up a cloud of dust onto their nice clean house).

During breaks from watching things break, we caught up with some friends so there wasn't time to do anything immediately useful on the mud shed.  Instead we played with some leftover sand from the concrete mix, to see if adding sand to mud and cow manure (instead of adding plant fibre) could make a tough enough surface to walk on, because we want to pour a mud floor, if we can get the right mix.

Mud floor sample No.1

We started with half as much sand as clay-soil, then made a mix with equal parts sand and clay-soil.

Mud floor sample No.2 (showing snail trails from being left overnight in the rain!)

They will take a week or so to dry.  I don't think we've found what we're looking for, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, there was leftover floor sample mix, so I decided to add some iron oxide to see what affect that had on the colour, and spread it out as a patch of render on the South Wall, which I think is now the official experimental wall.

Spreads like creamy frosting

It was so light and fluffy that I had trouble smoothing it out without leaving trowel marks, but it was easy enough to use.  

Shiny

The wet colour is gorgeous, like the colour red-box gum leaves go sometimes, but it has started drying to a dusty pink.  It is also cracking way too much, which doesn't bode very well for the floor samples.

After about three hours of drying - the pale areas are the driest