Our Best Play Dough Tutorial

This week's How-To is Our Best Play Dough by Emily from Yarn Miracle here on the Natural Kids Team. On her blog, also called Yarn Miracle, you will find free knitting patterns and a lot of other great posts. Check out the amazing colour of the play dough below and have fun making yours!


Our Best Play Dough
I’ve made a lot of play dough in my time. Enough to have memorized my favorite recipe. It makes a good size ball and stores neatly in anything with a tight lid that can hold two cups.

If you do this with little people, make sure you trust them with the stove. The stove is not on in this picture.

Our Best Play Dough
Dump the following into a sauce pan and mix well:

1 c. all purpose flour
1 c. water
1/4 c. salt (table, no need to be fancy)
1 T. oil
2 T. cream of tartar
food coloring to suit taste

Put your pan over medium heat. The goop will look nice and smooth like this…

…if you’ve used neon green food coloring.

Start stirring. Right about the time you think your arm will fall off (5-10 minutes), this will happen:

It will start to pull away from the sides of the pan and clump together.

Keep cooking and stirring until the mess has barely stopped being shiny and then pull it off of the heat. I also dump it out of the pot so it will stop cooking and not get too hard. Give it a few minutes to rest. When it’s cool enough to touch, knead the play dough until it’s smooth. I find that kneading is easier while it is still warm.

Wash your pot and repeat until you’ve run out of colors or storage boxes. Or in our case, both.

All this took us less than an hour to mix up.

In an airtight container, it keeps far longer than you’d think. We’ll be playing with this batch well into March. Unless it all gets mixed into a muddy rainbow. Then we’ll have to make more.

This tutorial is brought to you by Natalie, of Woolhalla

Visit Emily at Yarn Miracle where you can see her original post, and at her Etsy shop Yarn Miracle. She has lots of gorgeous knitting patterns and beautiful knitted animals in her Etsy shop... chickens, roosters, bunnies, bears and more!