The first week of Chirstmas: Home Made Chalk

Home made chalk

 
Its a little later than I had planned but school holidays and a poorly toddler has delayed me a little but this is the first of my Christmas craft posts but is also good school holidays craft activity with older kids.

 

Make your own chalk? Seemed a little odd to me when I come across some instructions on how to make your own chalk. I had to have a play around and as you will see from the photos I had some success and some failure but have ended up with a recipe that makes great pavement chalk.

How to make pavement chalk
1 to 3 dessert spoon craft food dye powder
1/2 cup water
3/4 plaster of paris
spoon for mixing
cup to mix in
lunch bag for piping
card board to make moulds
baking paper to line moulds

Step 1: I used toilet rolls which I cut length ways then rerolled so that the diameter was about as thick as my thumb. Line the mould with baking paper so that the chalk can me taken out more easily. A few times I found a little bit of the paper stuck to the chalk but it didn't get in the way of the usability of the chalk.

Step 2: Mix food dye powder with water. The instructions I first used said to use tempera powder paint, however I found that the colours were much more vivid with the food dye. This in an aspect that needs to be played around with for personal taste.

Step 3: Add plaster of paris. At this point you need to work quit quickly because it starts to set reasonably fast at least to the point that it becomes difficult to work with. Mix the plaster with the dye and water until smooth and even.

Step 4: Pour into lunch baggie then snip off one corner and use this as a piping bag to fill the moulds. A couple of time when I had more mixture than moulds I poured the left overs into silicon ice trays which worked well for smaller pieces. I also played around with mixing two colours in one bag to get a marbled chalk which gave some interesting results.

Step 5: Wait 12 hours before trying to remove from mould.



From the silicon mould, great for little hands.



Some that don't look so pretty but still draw fine



 The plan is now that my son and I have discovered the perfect way to make pavement chalk we plan on making a few more patches so he can wrap up a few pieces and give them out as a hand made gift for his mates. He has a few great ideas for wrapping the which I will show you when we get up to it.

 

Some of the ones the look great too.