How to make coloured sand

Have you ever seen glorious coloured sand that costs a fortune? Well, you can learn how to make your own at home and it costs a fraction of the price.

Making your own coloured sand gives you the ability to explore and play with it as much as you like. You can use it to make decorative coloured sand bottles or in a heap of other ways too!

Making coloured sand is actually REALLY easy!

What you’ll need:

•  A bowl
• Food colouring dye. I used this Queen food colouring but I’ve heard this is a good alternative outside of Australia.
• Sand (any sand would work but white is best)
• A tray
• A cloth that you don’t mind coloured or destroyed. We used an old tea towel
• Water

 How to make coloured sand

1.  Add some sand to a bowl

2. Fill the bowl with water until the sand is all wet. It shouldn’t be runny, just wet.

3. Add the food colouring to the bowl and mix until you have an even colour. You will need a good amount of food colouring. The more you add the darker your sand will be.

4.  Scoop the sand out onto the tray covered with a tea towel (or whatever you’ve decided to use). The colouring does seep through the material, so if you’re using a tray that could get stained, I’d put plastic in between the tray and the material.

5. Do step 1-4 to make as many colours as you would like. We used red, blue, green and yellow but if you mix the colouring in the bowl you can get heaps of different colours and shades.

5. Take the tray out in the sun and let the sand dry.

6. Scoop the dry sand into separate containers.

So easy! We have lots of activities to share in the coming weeks showing how we explored sand as a play tool. We had a lot of fun!

Coloured Sand Activities

• Try making Coloured sand bottles
• Here’s some Coloured sand play in three ways