The octagonal straw bale cabin, site of our 2015 Straw Bale Workshop

Yesterday was the finale of our 2015 Straw Bale Workshop outside Berea, Kentucky. Our team of participants made it through a week of straw bale building, clay plastering, and more than our fair share of rain. Despite the far less than ideal weather conditions, everyone stayed remarkably upbeat and we achieved a lot of good work. Apparently even record-breaking rain couldn’t stop us from having fun.

I am so grateful to our top notch team of participants who joined us this year! Here’s a look back at some of the construction work we accomplished this past week.

Beginning with Straw Bale Basics

We always begin our workshops with the fundamentals. After a site orientation and safety talk, we jumped right into working with the bales themselves. Straw bales are very convenient building blocks, but they do require a bit of preparation to make the stacking process as smooth as possible.

This year, our bales were a little less tight than desired. Thankfully, we only needed about 200 or less in the entire building, so it was worth compressing them before they went into the wall. Using a simple lever, we compressed each bale and retied them so that they would be tighter and more sound. Our co-instructor Mark Mazziotti demonstrated a few essential knots for the retying process.

Mark demonstrates compressing a straw bale with a simple lever

Other essential things we covered included splitting a straw bale and squaring the ends. When building a straw bale house, you occasionally need a custom-sized straw bale. With a bale needle (think oversized sewing needle), you can weave bale twine through the bale and fairly accurately split it to the desired length. This is about as complicated as it gets with individual bales, and even this is pretty simple after doing a few of them.

A successful straw bale split

You can use a variety of methods to “square” a straw bale. Squaring up a bale entails making each end flat. Usually they’ve got a bit of a rounded shape on either end from the tension of the twine. We use utility knives to first score the straw, and then follow it up with a wood block wrapped in diamond lath to “scrub” the bale to be roughly square. This is not absolutely essential, but it certainly makes for less stuffing between bales later in the building process.

Scrubbing the straw bale ends to make them more square

Because our workshop project is an octagon, we had some interesting corners to work with. Conveniently, we used each “corner” post as a tool to bend alternating courses of straw bales. You can use this same technique when building a round straw bale house — if you push a straw bale against a round object (like a barrel) or in a shallow, rounded trench, you can achieve the shape you want.

Putting a bend on a straw bale for the corner of the octagon

The first couple courses went up in no time at all!