All hands on hearting.

This is a photo taken around lunch time yesterday (Thursday) at the three-day Knox Church Walling Workshop in Dunedin Ontario. This gift to the community was organized by a Anna Hobbs a member of this quiet country hamlet in the rolling hills just outside Creemore. Anna wanted to make a contribution to the church garden fund in honour of her late husband. The small fee for this workshop went towards some of the cost of the stone which was kindly supplied by Credit Valley Quarries at a very reasonable rate. Stone material originally had been ordered from another source but arrangements fell through at the very last minute. A call to Lisa at Credit Valley saved the day and the stone arrived just hours before the workshop began.

This is a lovely workable sandstone which is surprisingly light and easy to shape. The selection was just perfect, combining a good number of nice flat copes, hearting , some long 'throughs' and great builders.

It was a beautiful day for learning how to make 'walls without mortar'. It rained just as we went for lunch at twelve (which was kindly provided by the ladies of the church) and then the rain stopped exactly one hour later. The rest of the day was sunny and cooler enabling the 12 participants to be very productive.

The first course of stone seen here in the picture above has just been hearted, and the students have all taken their time to see that every stone, down to the smallest one is fitted carefully in between the larger building stones so that they don't rock or leave any spaces for anything to slump or loosen.

This will be a curved wall and gate feature that wraps around the crescent shaped driveway beside the old Presbyterian Church situated in the middle of Dunedin. This wall will be easily seen from the road.

I had done a design some time ago using Sketchup and Photoshop to give an idea of what the wall would look like when this benefit DSWAC workshop was completed, which I emailed to Anna, and which the local newspaper printed recently, along with an article giving the details about the church's plans to build this wall. I had forgotten what it looked like and was pleasantly surprised to see how realistic the picture of the wall looks. Now all we have to do is build it that well!