How to make kinetic sand – easy kinetic sand recipe
Welcome to the squishy, mouldable, magical stuff of messy play dreams! Fid out how to make kinetic sand with our step by step guide
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You can buy some great starter kinetic sand kits out there – we’ve added a few of our favourites below, but where the real fun begins is when you make your own! There are so many different kinetic sand recipes out there on the internet. You can transform regular play sand into kinetic sand by adding a couple of easy-to-find ingredients – mainly cornflour (aka corn starch if you’re in the States) and an agent to add the extra firmness – we’ve used vegetable oil here but you can also use a mix of water and washing up liquid.
When it comes to play and craft ideas for kids, sand comes top of our list every time. We’ve carefully tested out a few different recipes to try the various options for ingredients and put together this guide for how to make kinetic sand for you using our favourite recipe. We have used regular play pit sand for our tutorial but you can also use coloured play sand (£11.95 for a pack of 6 colours, Baker Ross) if you want to get bright colours without using food colouring.
You might also like our favourite crafts for toddlers, or try our play dough recipe and easy salt dough recipe.
You Will Need
- Sand (3 cups), Fine play sand is best
- Cornflower (2 cups), (Corn starch if you are in the US)
- Vegetable oil (1/2 cup)
- Food colouring
Total time:
Step 1
Mix two cups of cornflour with three cups of sand together in a bowl. We have used regular play sand (£15.99, Amazon) – this works best with fine sands, and works nicely with coloured play sands too.
Step 2
Pour half a cup of vegetable oil into the sand and flour mixture. You can also add some drops of food colouring at this point if you want to make coloured sand. Mix together with a spoon and then with your hands to squish it all firmly together.
Step 3
Your sand is now ready to play with! Find a surface (be prepared – it will get messy and we kids will love it!) and you can start to mould, cut and shape your DIY kinetic sand.
Step 4
We’ve used play dough cutters and tools with our sand. It’s also fun to play around with making different textures by pressing objects into it.
Authors
Zoe is the launch Editor of Gathered.how. She has over a decade of craft publishing experience under her belt. She's a quilter and sewist who works with the UK’s best-selling craft magazines including Today’s Quilter, Love Patchwork & Quilting, Simply Sewing and The World of Cross Stitching. Zoe loves being immersed in Gathered’s quilting content, tweaking our tutorials and publishing new patterns. Zoe has previously written for radiotimes.com, Simply Knitting and The World of Cross Stitching and was previously Deputy Editor of Papercraft inspirations magazine. She has guest-lectured at Bath Spa University. She’s a keen quilter with 5 projects in progress at any one time and another 12 or so planned.
