Bring the Beach Home - With a Sand Bowl

One of the many perks of living in Jacksonville, especially where we live, is its proximity to the beach.  I've never lived near the beach, the closest body of water I had growing up was the Danube, which is beautiful, but you only swim in it if you want to get radiation poisoning.  (Explains a lot about my brother, Jonathan)

So, it's a real treat to live only a 15-20 minute drive from 5 different beaches.  And we love it.  In fact, we love it so much, we decided to go with a beach theme in our living room. Not a nautical, lighthouse, blue and white kind of theme.  (Please don't take offense if this is you, just not our scene.)  We're using neutrals, with a couple featured colors.  About a month ago we found these great couch covers at Target, and these awesome kind of tribal-looking pillows that gave us the color-scheme.

Now, on to today's project.  Sand bowl.

What you'll need is:

Sand

White Elmer's School Glue

A bowl

Plastic wrap

Disposable bowl and spoon

And that's it!

Dan and I went to the beach a couple weeks ago, to go shelling, and we took a ziplock with us to get some local sand.

When we got home, I put the bag of sand in the freezer, to make sure all the critters that live in the sand died before I glued them to death.  (Apparently freezing to death is more humane, go figure.)

After three days in the freezer, I figured it was good to go.  

I used a disposable bowl and spoon to mix about a 1/2 up of sand with the white glue, until it has a runny texture.

Next, I wrapped a bowl I liked the size of in plastic wrap.

I poured a little bit of the sand mixture onto the bowl.  

Pour some, wait for it dry a little (hour or so), then pour a little again, wait, pour it again, wait... until it looks how you want it to.

Then you just have to wait.  I would say 72 hours.  Then, lift the plastic wrap off the bowl, then gently pull the wrap off the sand, and voila!

Now, I poured too much, and my first layer went a little crazy, so it pooled at the bottom.  I had to take some scissors to it, and cut it to where I liked it.

I tried to follow the natural lines, and give it the look of the "waves".  

After that, I simply sprayed a clear sealant, to harden it up a little bit, make it so it wouldn't crumble, and keep Bella from being tempted to chew on it.

And here's my awesome sand bowl!

I put sea glass in it, and set it on our new crate coffee table,
for which there will be a blog entry up very soon!

To help you out, here are a couple tips:

1. Start off only pouring a little bit at a time.  I poured too much, and it made everything else harder than it needed to be.  

2. Set the bowl on some plastic wrap, just in case it overflows. 

3. Try to get the plastic wrap under the sand mixture as wrinkle-free as possible, because the sand will mold to whatever it looks like.

4.  The more layers it has, the longer it'll take to dry, however the harder and sturdier it'll be too.

Hope that helped some people out there, who have seen this on pinterest, but felt it was too overwhelming.  It was super easy, inexpensive and fun!  In fact, I think I might have my kids make them for mother's day.

Enjoy!  Let me know if this works for you, if you've tried something else that worked better!

ps: I've changed every setting in the comments section, but people still aren't able to comment on my posts.  Any bloggers out there have any ideas on how to fix this?  I'd love any help I can get!  Email me at abigailgracza@gmail.com