Sand Art

The cooler temperatures lately have allowed us to spend more time outdoors lately.  They’ve also inspired crafty moments, like the other day when we painted with glue and colored sand.

We had done this once before, when we made our sandy spider webs last fall.  (So much fun!) This time around I thought it would be fun (and good practice with their names) to make signs for each kid’s bedroom door.

I used a pencil to write each of their names on the colored paper they had chosen.  Then they used a paintbrush and carefully traced each letter with Elmer’s glue.  The next step was sprinkling the glue with colored sand and tilting the paper this way and that to get the sand to stick to each letter, making them “magically appear” right before our eyes.  Once they were all covered, we tapped the extra sand off and back into plastic containers.  A few stickers, and voila`!  A fun and simple way to personalize each of their doors.

Since we were still in a crafty mood and had plenty of sand left, I found a couple large pictures from one of our coloring books.  My idea was to paint the pictures with the glue and sand.  I did a test run first and found that it was impossible to cover the whole picture with the sand, leaving white areas.

So we decided to color the pictures with crayons first, and then paint with the glue and sand over the crayon, eliminating white areas.  (Doing just small segments with the sand would really make those areas stand out!)

It really doesn’t take much sand to “paint” a coloring book picture, and they had fun using this new technique.  Plus, we have some great artwork to show off in the kitchen!

Have you done any crafting with colored sand?