make your own: paste.

No fooling, making your own paste for at-home craft projects isn’t as precious or time-consuming as it sounds. In fact, in a matter of minutes you can have something that’s easier to use, easier to cleanup, less expensive, and less wasteful than anything you’d be able to find readymade at the store.

Friends, allow me to remind you of the magic of wheatpaste.

Faye is entering a pretty serious crafting stage. And as other parents and caregivers of four-year-olds might know, the rate at which kids can plow through art supplies generally, and glue especially, is kind of staggering. When I noticed Ashley making wheatpaste for her boys a few months ago, I was intrigued. When I tried it for myself, I was delighted.

Other conventional glue options are fine, of course, but when kids enter the scene things start getting…stickier. Glue sticks dry up, or fall out of their plastic tubes and get covered in hair, or munched on by younger siblings, or squashed underfoot. Craft glues get gunked up, requiring minor surgery involving safety pins and parental cursing to start working again. Regular old Elmer’s Glue is fine, sure, but when you’ve got little ones who are not yet convinced that a little goes a long way, but very much determined to squeeze the bottle themselves, the stuff ends up everywhere.

Wheatpaste, on the other hand, is exceedingly easy to clean up, waste-free, odorless, and it uses so few ingredients, it’s practically free. The application with a paintbrush is an added bonus in the name of cleanliness, precision, and ease for little hands. I never want to see another glue stick again.

Like most things you can make yourself, there are slight variations and differences in ingredients or technique depending on who you ask. I’ve been making a very simple paste that combines all-purpose flour, water, and a pinch of salt.

Materials:

+ Flour

+ Water

+ Salt

+ Small jar

+ Whisk (or fork)

+ Small saucepan

Directions:

+ Combine equal parts water and flour into a small jar (or whatever size vessel you need for your project). (A tablespoon or two of flour and water usually gets us through an afternoon of paper chain or collage-making.)

+ Whisk the flour and water together, until the mixture is lump-free.

+ Pour the mixture into a saucepan and warm up over low heat. (If you accidentally heat the mixture too much and it starts to get lumpy, just thin with a bit of water and whisk again. If you fear the mixture is too thin, add a bit more flour until it’s the consistency you prefer. In my case, that’s about the consistency of heavy cake batter, but I’ve made thicker and thinner and they’ve worked equally as well.)

+ Once warmed through, transfer the paste back into your jar and use a paintbrush to apply the glue to your project.

+ If covered, the paste will last a few days.

A few more notes:

+ The salt isn’t strictly necessary here, but it will act as a preservative and help prolong the longevity of your paste. Still, the best part about making your own paste is being able to control how much you make, so aim for mixing just what you need for one project and you don’t need to worry about shelf-life.

+ Don’t expect the mixture to feel sticky to the touch, but trust it will stick two pieces of paper together in no time flat. The non-stickiness is actually my favorite part. Faye and Silas’s hands would get so glue-y themselves in past projects that they’d often abandon them in frustration. I find the wheatpaste to be so much more pleasant to work with.

+ We’ve admittedly only used our homemade glue on projects that are decidedly low stakes. I can’t guarantee it would work for you in every instance, or pass the test with every kind of paper you might decide to play with, but for rainy afternoons spent making cards, or collages, or paper chains, it’s been perfect (for kids and adults alike).

+ Add a bit more warm water and you’ve got yourself paste for your next papier-mâché extravaganza.