How to Make Colored Sand.

Hi, I'm Donni from the Etsy shop Fairyfolk and the blog The Magic Onions.

My son, Mr T, insisted on bringing home a bucket of sand from the beach. Unlike me, he loves sand so much and can play with it for hours. He really doesn't mind if it gets in his hair, his clothes, his bed!

So, to enthuse with this love, we decided to make colored sand.

This is what we needed;

a bucket of sand

a sieve

6 large Ziploc bags

6 colors of foodcoloring

spoons

paper towels

water

We made little bowls from the Ziplock bags like this...

We set our sieve in the Ziploc bowl and filled it with sand.

As the sand was from the beach, it was full of small shells that we wanted to separate from the sand. T loves to sift stuff. He took this job very seriously and meticulously sifted all the shells from the clean sand.

We arranged the sand-filled bags on the grass as the next step is to add the food coloring. We wanted to make sure that a mistake did not mean a permanently colored patio!

Granny helped Mr T wet the sand with water from a jug.
We added enough water to make the sand soggy. Too much water will make it hard for the sand to absorb the food coloring.

K joined us for the fun task of adding color to our soggy sand. We added food coloring liberally.

Then we zipped up the bags and massaged the color into the sand. K loved the tactile nature of massaging the sand through the bag. It was cool and squishy and made a wonderful scrunching noise if you listened carefully.

We added different colors to our bags of sand and then laid them flat for 30 minutes to let the sand absorb the color.

Then we turned each bag out onto a couple of sheets of strong paper towels to dry in the sand.

It dried in a day and was ready for all sorts of fun activities.

Look at these posts to see what we used our colored sand for.

Painting with colored sand.

Make a miniature Zen Garden.

Make tools for your miniature Zen Garden.

Blessings and magic.

Donni of Fairyfolk