Sand Clay

I've had a bag of sand hanging out in the garage since I planted my raspberry bushes a few months ago (they like a mix of sand and soil for good drainage). The hardware store where I bought my bag only carried sand in 50 lb increments, and I only used about 2 lbs in my planting, which means I have 48 left to use up somehow. Enter sand clay.

The texture of this clay is just like a grainy play-dough, but the real fun of it is that it will dry hard, meaning that you can use it to make summer treasures to keep.

Ingredients:

2 cups sand
1 cup cornstarch
1.5 cups water
2 tsps alum (found in the spice aisle)

Directions:

Combine the ingredients over medium-low heat, stirring constantly. Within a few minutes, the dough will begin to thicken up like playdough. Turn out onto a surface, kneading smooth when cool enough to touch. Shape and let dry overnight (or longer) to set. The clay can be stored in an airtight container for three or four days or so.

We made a sand castle, of course, and used our beach toys to cut out shapes and some shells from a recent beach trip to decorate them with. About halfway through I realized I could make Christmas tree ornaments and so I worked on that while A. made a few extremely scary sand snakes. We set our shapes outside in the sun to dry (it took about 12 hours) and put the rest away to play with over the next few days (by the end of day four it was gummy and pretty much finished). And only one piece broke, which is a higher success rate than we've had with either salt clay or baking soda clay.

I think this would be a great craft for when you want a little beachy fun but can't get to the beach, or a creative way to use up some of that sand you might bring back from a special beach vacation. I have a jar of sand somewhere that J. and I brought back from the red sand beaches of Prince Edward Island a few years ago -- if I can find it, I'm going to pull it out and make of ornaments out of it.

That last picture makes me think of this. Snake! A snaaaaake!