My boys and I had lots of crafty moments recently, and I wanted to share a couple of the successes with you. I’ve been making playdough for our older son for quite a while now. I always used a recipe that involved dumping flour, salt, cream of tartar, oil and water into a saucepan and then stirring it while it cooked. After a few minutes it would all clump together, and viola! Playdough!
Then I came across this recipe and decided to give it a try. It has less salt than the other recipe, and also includes glycerine (I had that in the cupboard already). But the main difference is that you add boiling water to the other ingredients and then stir and knead the dough off the heat. It took quite a bit longer, probably about 10 minutes of kneading – and adding in more flour every few minutes – to get the right consistency. But once it was finished, it was definitely the best playdough I’ve ever made. It’s soft and stretchy and has stayed that way through hours and hours of play. The other stuff I used to make would start to get crumbly and stiff after a few days, but he’s been using the new stuff for almost two weeks now and it still feels great.
We harvested a beet from our garden and put the peels in a saucepan of water and let it boil before straining out the chunks of peel and using the water for our playdough. It turned out a lovely shade of purple/pink.
I did break down and buy some food coloring recently, and I colored half the batch with blue food coloring and half with beet juice. Once we were finished, we used playdough toys (from Goodwill, of course) to make a little airplane and all sorts of other vehicles.
I also found instructions for dying pasta to use in crafts, and it worked perfectly. We got a package of generic pasta for a dollar and then colored it with rubbing alcohol and food coloring.
Our son loved this. As soon as they were dry, he started using them to build fences and houses and paths in his playdough.
His current favorite playdough accessories are the pasta and an old comb. The comb makes all sorts of neat patterns in the playdough. He can cut the dough with it, or just drag it around – it all ends up looking really cool.
Both of these projects are inexpensive (especially if you already have most of the ingredients on hand) and easy. And they’ll entertain your little ones for hours. Enjoy!
If you’re in the UK and need a small short term loan, check out jaguarpaydayloans.co.uk
Economiesofkale says
Awesome ideas, I will have to file these away for the future :) I remember playing for hours with homemade playdough as a kid. Another thing we loved (and I’m not sure if this fits with your diet) was edible playdough. This was essentially coloured cookie dough, which we could eat as we played. You can also make shapes from it and bake them but we found the dough tastier :)