
Making sand castles and sculptures is like everything else: it is easy with the right tools. And we have found the best sand tools around! They'll fit right in with your child's toys, or in the grown-up bucket. They're priced right, and last forever!
Can You Dig It Sand Tools are simple and easy to use for anyone, and the results you can have are limitless! Whether you're about to attempt your first castle ever, or looking for a competitive edge in the next local beach sand sculpting contest, Can You Dig It Sand Tools are a must have!
"I've taught thousands of beach goers how to make terrific sand castles. They start by telling me they don't have the skills. But I know better from the results I see each and every time I teach. Man, woman or child, they are all amazed at what they do on their very first try."
-Sandman Matt, creator of the Super Deluxe Sand Sculpting Kit
Hints and How-To's |
Wet The Sand!!! |
| And we don't mean wet, but really wet. The sand MUST be wet through and through if you want it to hold its shape. You can't have too much water. The excess will run out and the sand will find it's own natural saturation point. The idea here is: different sand, different saturation point, but all sand must be saturated! |
Pack The Sand!!! |
| The tighter you pack the sand, the better it will hold together. Packing sand in a Can You Dig It Form is the way to go. Pound it, smack it, pat it down tight, hit it, strike it, batter it down, thump it, pummel it till it's tight, clobber it, sock it, beat it with anything you have. get the idea? |
Take It From The Top, And Work Inside Out!! |
| Always work from the top down!! Unless you enjoy doing things twice. Once you complete an area, you don't want to work above it thus having to re-clean the completed sections below and risk ruining lower details: same thing with details closer to the center of your creation. Don't make an outer wall and then try to move to the middle for a walkway: it messes up your wall when you try to get sand out of the middle. |
GO Slooooooooooow!! |
| Patience is more important than talent, especially when you're learning. Remove small amounts of sand at a time. This is not clay! You may not think so, but it is very difficult and in most cases impossible to replace sand on the initial pile once it is gone. If you are trying to pack sand after you are into the sculpture, what do think happens to your completed work? And remember: It is a rare occasion if ever that a detail can be created with just one pass of a tools. Make several passes with the tools to create a detail removing a little sand at a time until you have the look you want. |
Pile High, Pile Wide!!! |
| Start with a pile a bit larger than you think you will need. We don't "build" a sand sculpture. We create a sand sculpture by removing all the parts of the pile that are not part of the creation! We must then make sure that there's plenty of sand to make a castle before we shape it in the first place! As we said above, it is difficult to add sand to our pile once we are fairly well into the piece. |
No Shovel = Bummer! |
| Sounds obvious I know, but many of you are hesitant to show up with hardware. It's O.K.! Smart dads have brought shovels to the beach for years even if they never made a castle. I recommend a short handled flat coal shovel. It is discreet and effective. I like the flat face shovel instead of the spade type because it lets me scrape the sand if I need to. Look around for the best sand on the beach. |
Watch the Tide! |
| If you don't want to carry a lot of water, wait until the tide is going out. This will expose well-saturated sand and still give you considerable working time. The sand is often finer at the tide line also. If you are willing to sculpt sand longer than it takes for the tide to change, you're hooked. Start collecting all the other paraphernalia that we obsessed sand-people use. Get Forms! Take a real shovel to the beach! |
Better sand = Better results! |
| This may sound silly, but on any given beach the sand can run from great to bad. Example: In Cape May, NJ, I try not to dig too deep. It seems the best sand here is only the top 4-6 inches down. After that it gets coarser. If a beach has them, often the sand is usually finer closer to jetties. Sometimes closer to the shore is better and sometimes vice versa. Do some reconnaissance. Often it pays! |