Every couple of months we clear out the arts and crafts supplies. Inevitably, we find various half-used tubes of glue that are shrivelled and dried or have missing lids. So, instead of wasting money on buying more, we decided to make our own and it worked like a charm.

Plain, white liquid school glue is the base for all of these formulas. The only tricky part is to mix a little bit at a time, adding more colour or glitter as you need.

We like to use the small plastic nozzle bottles because they make the glue super easy to apply and store. If the nozzle tip gets clogged, you simply cut it off the next time you want to use your custom mix.

You can use any plastic or glass container with a tight-fitting lid to mix and store your concoctions. Stored tightly closed and in a cool place, the mixtures will keep like regular glue.

Option 1: Acrylic Paint

Start off by decanting the amount of glue that you need for your project into your chosen container.

Slowly add acrylic paint (regular craft paint is perfect) a little at a time. We used black paint that was quite thick. Stir or shake (with the lid on!) to combine. We started off using bamboo sticks then ended up shaking the containers as we added more black paint. You should end up using roughly ¼ paint to ¾ glue.

Option 2: Food Colouring

If you don’t have acrylic paint on hand, you can substitute food colouring. For our test, we used the liquid version and it worked well. The gel version would likely produce similar results. We mixed blue and red to make purple, shaking it along the way. Food colouring is very intense so the proportion was less than with the paint. Start with a few drops and add more if you need.

Option 3: Glitter Powder

The proportion of glitter to glue is about the same as with acrylic paint (1/4 glitter powder), but add as much as you need to achieve the required level of sparkle.

We experimented by also adding glitter powder into the purple glue that we made with food colouring. It made it darker and came out looking very pretty.

Our results (from left to right): black glue (paint), purple glue (food colouring), purple glitter glue (food colouring and glitter), sparkly bronze glue (only glitter)

Helpful Hint

When using this glue in arts and crafts, it needs to dry for at least a few hours, preferably overnight, before you can continue with your project.

Now use your coloured and glitter glue in this fun rainbow fish craft project.