6♣ – Make a sand castle

Two weeks in a row we have a very childhood related projects. Last week was the pinwheel and this week a sand castle. I don’t know if there is a person who never wanted to build one, but until now, I didn’t really have a chance. I was at the sea only a couple of times in my life and it was in Montenegro. And they are definitely not famous for sandy beaches. This year however, I am on Skiathos, and they don’t lack sand here. Although, there is a big difference in sand on different beaches, which is something I learned too late for this project. I made this sand castle on the Kolios beach which is a nice small beach close to my accommodation, but the sand is not really fine. It’s more like a really fine gravel. A couple days after that I was at Koukounaries beach which has much finer sand so it would probably be easier to make a castle.

Due to the kind of sand I was working with, I wasn’t able to make some grandiose castle, so I had to settle for this small one that looks more like a mausoleum if I’m being honest. The stairs are actually my favorite part about it. It was really difficult to make it hold its shape and you can see it crumbling a bit in the upper left corner. Next time, I’ll make a huge castle, but for now, it was nice to have a childhood dream come true.

If you want to see what happened to the castle a couple of minutes after I finished it, watch the video bellow.

Boring stuff

This is another time where you really can’t call this section boring stuff. It’s literally playing in the sand. But, if you really want to get technical, I’ll tell you a bit about it. You would think that making sand castles is easy since it’s child’s play, but you would be wrong. Here, as well as mostly everywhere, there are special techniques and people who are professionals at it. So, as usual, I looked for the help of the professionals… on YouTube. Here is the tutorial I watched. I got some basic tips and tricks out of it and they were extremely helpful.

The most important ingredient is water. You need lots of water if you want your sand to hold its shape. You can use molds like buckets to make the shapes you want, but you can also use your hands to pack the sand tightly and then shape it afterwards which is what I did. In the tutorial they suggest a wooden ruler which is something I definitely hadn’t bring to a vacation, so I used cardboard from a cereal box folded a couple of times. It was surprisingly effective. Other than that, there’s not much to say. Patience, water and sand. Oh, and sunscreen, you’ll be out there for a while.