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Our Best Play Dough Tutorial

Natural Kids: Our Best Play Dough Tutorial

Thursday, February 17, 2011

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!

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8 Comments:

Anonymous Alessandra @ Tribal Times said...

Looks like so much fun!! Will try it out this weekend!

February 17, 2011 at 11:15 AM  
Blogger Sweetness and Light said...

thank you for this recipe, I've been meaning to make some for the longest time, and now it's time :)

February 17, 2011 at 11:44 AM  
Blogger Eve's Little Earthlings said...

I made a lot of playdough in my daycare days and this is the recipe i used. Make sure it is stored in an airtight container. It will get very sticky if you don't.

February 17, 2011 at 1:01 PM  
Blogger FeeVertelaine said...

Oh wow! Thank you I've been looking for age for a great play dough recipes !!

February 17, 2011 at 1:35 PM  
Blogger woolies said...

ahh I dream of the days when making play dough made everybody so happy. long ago.......
:)

February 17, 2011 at 3:04 PM  
Anonymous Heidi said...

I've made this same playdough with a group of young parents - instead of food color we used powdered kool-aid mix which then also scents the playdough.

February 17, 2011 at 5:21 PM  
Blogger Yarn Miracle said...

Heidi, do you know the Kool-Aid/playdough mix ratio? It seems like a packet is too much for that little amount...

We used the McCormic NEON colors of liquid food coloring to get those brights.

February 18, 2011 at 4:45 AM  
Anonymous Lopi said...

Can you bake this?

July 18, 2011 at 8:09 AM  

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