Blogtoberfest day 9 - Home made play dough

The kidlets and I have been making play dough. There are quite few recipes available on the net and we plumped for this no cooking required one from instructables.com.

To make your own you will need -
2 cups flour
2 cups warm water
1 cup salt
2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon cream of tartar

We fudged the recipe quite a lot because of lack of tablespoon or a measuring cup so we mixed the flour/water/salt in a ratio of 2:2:1, added 2 glugs of veg oil and 2 heaped desert spoons of cream of tartar and it seemed to work out pretty well considering. After splitting the mixture into 6 we added a teaspoon of food colouring to each block and kneaded it into the dough to make loads of fun colours.

Play dough is such good fun to play with and is the most prefect distraction on a rainy afternoon. My son likes to make turtles and much about with play dough suitable scissors.

And my Daughter makes cookies and other treats for her imaginary cafe.

The cream of tartar makes homemade play dough last for ages, months even, as long as you store in airtight containers so don;t go throwing away your old empty play doh pots!

Have a lovely evening, Jo x

Homemade beetroot playdough #blogtoberfest13 day 26

Afternoon, here is a lovely and quick project that the kids and I made over the summer hols, using beetroot as a natural dye for homemade play dough. My lovely pal Sue sent me the link to this super blog post that offers up a good selection of natural dye suggestions and it was an irresistible temptation to go pick a beetroot from the lottie.

I chopped up the beetroot in to big ish chunks and boiled with a little bit of water to leach the colour out of the beetroot and then sieved out the lumps then I cooked the dyed water over a low heat in an old saucepan with a cup of flour, ½ cup of salt,  1 tablespoon of cream of tartar and 1 tablespoon of cooking oil. The mixture came together in the pan very quickly and was so easy to make. It was a big hit with the kids - and none of that odd manufactured playdoh smell! It kept pretty well too, I wrapped it in tin foil between play times and it was moist and workable for weeks.

I hope you are having a lovely chilled out Sunday

Jolene xx