Djeco Sand Art Craft Kit review

I've just been telling you about the Manhattan Toy Little Fix It tool kit that we received to review from Merry at Patch of Puddles, but she didn't forget the girls - they also received a Djeco Sand Art Craft Kit to try out. Sophie excitedly unpacked it all and discovered the contents - 12 colours of sand and 4 drawings in a sturdy re-usable box.

If you're unfamiliar with sand art, it's a brilliant crafts activity for children of all ages who can get a really impressive, precise result every time. The picture is adhesive so you peel off the backing paper for the specific area you want to colour, pour the sand over, spread it out and tip off the surplus. It's very simple - you get a little plastic tool to help you lift off the backing paper - and, as well as being good fun, it gives your little crafters something they can proudly hang on the wall afterwards.

We first discovered sand art while on holiday in Turkey last year and I bought some kits on ebay when we got back. The huge advantage of the Djeco kit is the cleverly-designed box. As well as being robust enough to protect all the contents, it has one corner snipped off so you can use it as a tray for making the picture in then use the hole in the corner as a funnel to get all the excess sand back into the little pot. Genius !

Each pot of coloured sand is numbered to correspond to the numbers on the backing paper so you can do it as a colour-by-numbers and follow the model or just let your imagination run wild and use whichever colours you like. The only thing I absolutely loathe is the little pots - they are near on impossible to open, especially for a child. I ended up using a combination of my teeth and a nail file but still had sore fingers and a Tshirt covered in spilt sand by the time I'd managed to get all the lids off some 15 minutes later. I know they need to be resealable to keep the sand safe but there is no way kids could get the lids off by themselves, which is frustrating.

For the final picture in the box, we were running low on a couple of colours, but that's probably down to the spillages when trying to get the lids off ! I took the photos when 10-year-old Sophie was making her picture, but 7-year-old Juliette also had great fun making them too. Even much younger kids could quite successfully use the kits though, with adult supervision so that they don't knock over the little pots of sand. There are other designs available that would appeal to older kids too, including Birds of Paradise, Children of the World and Mandalas, so it's an activity that the whole family can enjoy.

star rating : 4/5 (it would have been 5/5 with different pots !)

RRP : £12.95

for more information : http://www.playmerrilytoys.co.uk/product/6072/djeco-sand-art-craft-kit---in-a-garden

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