Homemade Playdough

Play-dough, so many of us played with it as children and it provides an excellent outlet for sensorial and imaginative play. It seemed like time to introduce my little lamb to the magic of play dough. So I made some.

Using Google instead of Pinterest for once I found a recipe I was happy with.

This recipe comes together really quickly.

It's just a matter of gathering your ingredients,

mixing them together,

heating them on medium heat over the stove

while whisking away until the mix thickens,

and then kneading your play-dough smooth.

If you wear rings you're going to want to take them off before you begin kneading the dough.

Where things began to take more time for me was colouring the play-dough. Knowing that my little lamb was going to put this into her mouth whether I wanted her to or not I wanted this to be as non-toxic as I could manage. And the standard store-bought, food colouring dyes really aren't as non-toxic as you may assume.

Seperate the dough as evenly as you can into as many balls as you think you will be able to have colours for.

For yellow I used Tumeric (you're going to end up needing quite a bit of this) and for orange I used Paprika.

Blue was one of my more difficult colours. I took some frozen blueberries and heated them in the microwave. After squeezing out the juice I added baking soda until I had something resembling blue. I used more blueberries than shown here. This is the amount I started with before I realized just how much I was going to need.

For red I used a frozen mix of wild berries.

Just add the colour slowly to the ball of dough you wish to colour and knead it in as thoroughly as you can. Continue doing this until you have the colour you were hoping for or close enough to it that you no longer care ;p.

Seal in an airtight container to insure your play-dough doesn't dry out quickly.

When I finally gave my little one the play-dough to enjoy the first thing she did was try to eat it, the second, was sniff it. Non-toxic win.