3 - Materials Used

I'll be reviewing the step-by-step details in subsequent posts, but before we began, we made sure that we had all of the "ingredients" we needed for this recipe. We were fairly obsessive about wanting to use cheap local resources (where local mostly = "our yard") or recycled material. As it turns out, it would've been pretty cheap even if we'd bought all the materials new (which is a weird way to refer to rocks and clay and straw in any event).

• clay (6 five-gallon buckets of clay dug up from our yard -- it was only about 1 foot down)
• sand (4 bags of play sand, purchased at the hardware store because when we tried to use sandy dirt from our yard, little rocky impurities shredded our tender widdle feet during the stomp)
• straw (1 bale, purchased from a local farm store)
• gravel (8 painful wheelbarrows full, which we scraped from a underused section of our long gravel driveway)
• rocks (salvaged from a construction company's fireplace renovation)
• wine bottles (6 bottles from our recycling bin)
• tarp (10" x 20", used to stomp mix of clay and sand)
• water from our garden hose (this could've been in a five-gallon bucket, it's just to moisten the clay/sand mix during the stomp)