Homemade Play Dough

While Mom and Wade were here, we finally got around to making some of our own play-dough.  I don't know why I kept putting it off, because it was really stinking easy.  We started with yellow play dough (because yellow is Elora's favorite color) on Tuesday.  She and my mom played with it for hours.

 It was so much fun, and so easy to make, that we made two more batches on Wednesday, in red and blue. But each batch makes a lot of play dough, so it was a no-brainer to turn it into a lesson about colors.  We made the red, and then set about mixing up the perfect orange.

She was having such fun playing with the orange that I had to drag her away to help me make the blue, but then it was back to mixing colors.  We took the three primaries, yellow, red, and blue, and mixed them to make the three secondaries: orange, green, and purple.

We ended up with a ton of the blue, because it didn't take much blue to turn yellow into green, or red into purple, but otherwise, she has pretty much even portions of each color.

The play dough is her new favorite toy.  She was quite put out that I made her stop playing long enough to snap a few pictures of all the colors, and could not get her hands back into it fast enough.  She'd been making green worms with Oma, and then counting them in the style of The Count from Sesame Street, right down to the funny laugh.

As soon as she realized that it made us laugh, she really started hamming it up.  It was awesome.  Since then, she's played with her new play dough pretty much every day, and every time the green comes out, she makes worms and counts them.  And I still laugh.  :)
So, want to know how I did it?  Easy-peasy!  I followed this recipe exactly, every time.  She doesn't give a measurement for the glitter, though, so I ended up using 1Tbsp of iridescent glitter in each batch.  To color them, we used my Wilton gel food coloring.  The yellow didn't take much of the food coloring to get a nice bright color, but the red and the blue both did. Those gel colors are pretty expensive, so I may try the Kool-Aid next time.  And as a side note, we did use my good sauce pan for making the play dough, and everything--glitter included--washed out without any problem at all.  I did get a wooden spoon from the thrift store for mixing it, though, because I didn't want my good wood spoons turning colors.

There you have it!  Happy play dough making!