Wearing a red T-shirt smeared with chunks of sandy clay, first-grader Elijah Dunn-Feiner stepped up on a stool mid-morning Saturday, the center of attention in a room full of clay-smeared adults, to lay the first handmade mud brick on the stick-and-stone skeleton of Flatbread Pizza Company’s new pizza oven in Edgartown.

Elijah’s mother, Deb Dunn, joined the crowd in cheering her son as he kicked off construction. Then together they resumed the communal brick-making work. They stood behind one of the black plastic tubs filled with clay, sand, ash and hay that sat on top of picnic tables around the room. He stuck his hands back into the bucket to punch and fold the grayish clay mixture into another football-sized brick.

The Flatbread owners began work on the oven last week, building the foundation with large stones collected from around the Nectar’s property. Above the stones they tied sticks and branches into a dome-shaped hood, and covered it with sheets of burlap. The clay bricks were molded on top of the hood. When the restaurant opens to the public early next month, the wooden frame will burn away when the first fire is lit.

Each brick-making station took on a different color, with red bricks coming from one direction, gray, yellow and white bricks from others. Flatbread owner Jay Gould manned the oven as the hood began to take shape, smoothing the lumpy clay along the way. A scribbled diagram he’d drawn to help plan the color-scheme was soon tossed to the side, smudged with clay. Instead, he decided to wing it and hope that organically the finished oven would take on the multicolored look of the Cliffs at Gay Head as he had originally planned.

Islanders were in and out of the Nectar’s property at the airport, where Flatbread will share a space this summer, through the morning to help with the oven-building effort. Cartons of fresh coffee and donuts, supplied by the owners, lay mostly untouched as everyone found themselves covered head-to-toe with clay.

Some smears were deliberate, smudged on cheekbones like football players. One man covered his smooth head with the muddy mixture, building a helmet that grew gradually as he continued to add new chunks of clay through the morning and afternoon.

“It got worse — or better, depending on how you look at it,” joked Mr. Gould about the clay-playing through the day.

The open oven-building turned out a mixed group — with some curious Islanders coming to check out a new Vineyard business and take part in the community oven-building exercise, and workers from other Flatbread locations invited to help in the effort to launch the new store.

“We had about 30 or 40 local people show up,” said Mr. Gould yesterday, including some prospective Flatbread employees.

The group took a short break for lunch, but the oven was finished by around 4 p.m. As a finishing touch, Mr. Gould said that children studded the still-soft clay oven with different stones collected from an Island beach.

“Everything went well, and we’re happy with it,” said Mr. Gould.