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!

Halloween 2011

The girls were fairies for Halloween this year.  The original plan was for Elora to wear the official Dallas Cowboys cheerleader uniform that her Aunt Dawn got for her, but the outfit is still way too big for her.  It worked out well: I'd been wanting to make tutus for them anyway, and I had 2 pairs of wings that I could remake for them.

What the wings used to look like.

What they look like now.

 The tutus were easy-peasy, (I used ribbon instead of elastic) but those wings were a royal pain!!!  At first I though I could just throw some tulle on there and gather it at the inner sides, but that was simply not going to work.  Then I tried using pantyhose, but it squished the wings too much.  I was able to make it work on Kaylie's wings, but then I ruined it by trying to paint them and had to start over.

Finally, I wrapped the wire forms with long, narrow strips of tulle, then cut more tulle to fit the wings and stitched it on over the wrapped frames, and used puffy paint and glitter to decorate them.  They're tied on with another set of long ribbons of tulle.

"Really? You're going to make me wear these stupid wings? You do know I am going to try to eat them, right??"

Kaylie merely tolerated her costume, but  Elora had a blast getting all dressed up.  I painted her nails and did her make up, which she loved.  She was super excited about putting her tutu and wings on (I hadn't let her play with them so she wouldn't mess them up) and was very good about letting me do her hair.  When they were ready, we took them outside for pictures...

...and then took them to the mall for trick-or-treating.

Elora didn't seem to like the trick-or-treating.  I think she was overwhelmed by the crowd; there were a ton of people there. Once we got out of the crowd, she perked up again.  It also helped that "aunt" Bekah met us at the mall just as we were finishing up.

Then we had Abuelo's for dinner, just like we did last year, and Rebekah joined us there too.