We were live on BBC radio Norfolk this morning showing the presenter around our new cob house. You can hear the 3 minute interview herehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00jr0vf Go to 2hrs 22 minutes into the interview to hear about cob!

The Index of Inclusion and cob workshops in your school

Visit this link to scroll through the slides in the powerpoint about how our cob workshops can help your school be more inclusive. There's loads of pictures!

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150319749576217.387607.580091216

Straw bale section goes on and we plaster with cob on day 2 of our course

OUr 4 day cob building course started today!

Eleven new cobbers arrived today from all over the world - UK, Bulgaria and Japan! The sun shone all day, and we've had a fantastic time learning how to make the perfect cob mix, building the first foot of cob on a stem wall, and working on the cob stairs. We've got a great bunch of friendly people here for the next 4 days so it promises to be great fun.

And thank you all for your kind compliments regarding the food - the guy who told me my lunch was 'a masterpiece' - I'll slip you extra large portions tomorrow!!

If you're thinking about coming on our complete cob course, please get in touch to book on our next course which takes place in August - there are just a few spaces left. Email us info@edwardsecobuilding.com or call us on 01493 369952. Find out more at www.edwardscobbuilding.com

Thurlton Primary build a cob oven

Digging holes, dancing on mud and getting covered in clay - building a pizza oven at school is a memorable experience for children. The pupils at Thurlton were great fun to work with and we hope they enjoy cooking the food they grow in their school grounds, in their new earthen oven! They designed it all themselves, and built it themselves - we just helped them make it happen!

If your school want to build a pizza oven and learn about sustainable building workshops we do, call me (Charlotte) on 07766 220526.

New dates added for our build a earthen/ cob pizza oven courses

Lots of you have been in touch asking when we're putting the rest of our summer dates for courses on the website. Well we've done it at last! See www.edwardscobbuilding.com and go to the courses page and scroll down to see all the pizza oven course dates for June, July, August, September and October. Here's a lovely oven made by some cobbers on one of our workshops recently.

Ellingham Primary School get cobbing

Ellingham Primary School in South Norfolk already have several Green Flags - they're an impressive Eco School. And I had the pleasure of working with their Year 5/6 class last week - making cob, learning more about sustainable building and creating cob sculptures. The pupils were a joy to meet - so good at digging and mixing the cob and so friendly and enthusiastic. The picture below shows pupils mixing the cob themselves. You can't spot them in this picture, but wondering around the school grounds were several school chickens! Thanks Ellingham for a great time!

Owl class build a cob pizza oven with us

The pupils from Owl Class at Thompson Primary School in South Norfolk built this marvellous wood fired earthen oven with us last week. Can you tell what it is?! The children were so enthusiastic and natural cob dancers - we hope they enjoy many mouthwatering pizzas from their new oven, for years to come. If looked after properly, their oven should last indefinitely. A teacher at the school is going to build a little shed roof over it to protect it and add a lime render for extra protection. If you build a cob oven though and you don't want to bother with a roof, just wrap a tarps around it when you're not using it and it'll be fine.

New cob course dates added!

Our 4 day complete cob course on 'How to build your own cob house or cob studio' in May, has been over subscribed. And so due to demand we've decided to run a second course this summer.

It will take place at our site in Norfolk and run from Friday 12th August, until the end of Monday 15th August. We've put it over a weekend again, so participants have to take less time off work.

The cob course will cover everything you need to know - practical and theory in order to build your own cob project.

It will cover:

Design and passive solar design

Siting

Building and planning regulations

Getting the cob mix right

Cob-bale design

Cob Walls

How to insert windows and doors into cob

Roofs for cob construction

Foundations

Stem walls

Clay plastering

Lime rendering

Earthen floors

And more...............

You'll meet loads of great people, eat loads of yummy food, whilst learning masses from the cob expert Kate Edwards herself. And at the end of it, you'll be ready to go away and build your own cob house or cob studio.

The course costs £400. To book we need to send you a booking form you fill in and you return it to us with your deposit. Get in touch for a booking form and to ask questions by emailing us at charlotteevecreative@hotmail.com or by calling us on 01493 369952 or 07766 220526. You can also email us via the website www.edwardscobbuilding.com

We can't wait to meet you soon!

We're looking forward to more school work

This month we're looking forward to building a cob pizza oven with the pupils at Thompson Primary School in Norfolk. This picture shows an oven the children built with us at Kenninghall Primary school recently. They were natural cobbers and excellent sculptors!

If you know any schools that might like to get stuck in on a cob workshop with us, get them to call me on 01493 369952 or email me at charlotteevecreative@hotmail.com.

We build ovens, benches, sculpture, and even outdoor classrooms with young people and their schools.

On a high!

On a high!

Kate's been up on the roof again today, and

she's mastered the art of turning the reed. Her thatching is looking great.

Rojo our apprentice learnt how to limerender today and he's done a great job.

And I've been chatting to several schools in Norfolk this afternoon who've all booked us to come and run cob workshops with them this Spring - which is really exciting.

Kate gives talk on cob in Graz

Suffolk County Council recently asked us if we'd go to Graz in Austria and give a presentation about cob building, to delegates from all over Europe at the Cradle to Cradle convention.

Kate did a stonking presentation and we're hoping to be visiting Bulgaria and Hungary soon to run cob workshops.

The Cradle to Cradle Network is funded by the EU and it's a network for sharing good practice in sustainability across Europe.

Check out their website at http://www.c2cn.eu/

I'm still bleating on. This is the last for today though.

We're on Twitter now.

Visit http://twitter.com/#!/cobbuilding

See the clay-lump and wattle & daub

Banging on!

This is what all the noise is about. Kate and Rojo are knocking off the cement render to expose the wattle and daub (left side of picture) and clay-lumps (right side of picture). They're patching up the holes they find with new cob they've made, and then when it dries, Kate will show Rojo how to lime render.

It's really easy to maintain and repair your old cob or clay-lump house. We can show you how to do it on one of our cob courses, or you can get us to help you with it. Get in touch if you want to find out more. www.edwardscobbuilding.com

The cob-bale extension latest

This is the cob-bale extension we're building at the moment, onto our 400 year old wattle & daub and clay-lump cottage. The front walls you see are solid cob. The back wall is north facing, so it has straw bales embedded into it. This combination of straw and cob means that when this extension is finished, it won't need any heating! So not only is cob the ultimate sustainable building material - when cob houses are finished, they're also very eco to run. They're just so dammed perfect!

You can see here that Kate has started the thatch. Today she's been on the roof in the freezing cold, building the chimney stack, ready to thatch around. I'll put pictures of that on soon. We're going to build a Romford cob fire place in the sitting room - it's an open fire but it's as efficient as a woodburner - we'll take you through how to build one when we do ours.

Right, I have to go as I can't concentrate any more with the banging - our new apprentice Rojo is chipping the cement render off the old house so we can replace it with a lime render. It is essential that earth houses have a lime render so the walls can breath and no moisture is trapped.

Okay. See you later.

Charlotte.

The cob blog starts here

It's 4 degrees outside and we've just come in from a hard day's cobbing. We're building a cob-bale extension to our house at the moment, and we're re-rendering the old wattle-daub exisiting cottage. The commorants have landed on bird island for the night, the dew is on the grass and I'm running a hot bath to leap into. I'm too cold to write any more tonight but watch this space - I'm gonna tell you everything there is to know about cob and earth building on this blog. I'll give you tips, techniques, ideas, advice and lots more. Plus I'll post loads of photos.
If you want to know more about us, see our website at http://www.edwardscobbuilding.com/
You'll find out about all our cob courses there.