Do your kids enjoy working with clay? Here both playdough and clay are materials that the kids all enjoy using. We’ve been talking a lot about gnomes and fairies lately, a new favorite imaginative play interest for them, and the kids were concerned that their fairies and gnomes didn’t have a house to live in because we didn’t have any special castles for them. So to make sure our gnomes and fairies had somewhere to live we did this simple kids castle craft using clay and toilet paper rolls.
I had planned to use a cornstarch and glue clay mix but we were out of glue so instead we used this white clay recipe you can find over at The Imagination Tree.
Materials for kids castle craft:
- White Clay (see above link on how to make)
- Beads (we used Star Beads that we received from CraftProjectIdeas.com, these same beads are sold at Walmart)
- Toilet paper rolls
- watercolors/paint (optional)
How to Make Castles:
We rolled out our clay until it was big enough to wrap around our toilet roll. We just made basic “tower castles” as the girls called them but if you have older children in the house you could easily put a tissue paper box (or any square recycled box) between the to toilet rolls and stretch the clay around them (you may need a double batch for this) and have a full castle!
After wrapping the toilet rolls with clay the girls added star beads to their castles but pushing them into the clay.
I then let the kids castles dry for a few days. I removed the toilet rolls after 24 hours but it took about two days for the whole castle to dry solid.
Now mister gnome and his friends all have a lovely castles to call home!