Adventures in Home-made Play Dough

June 30, 2010

Adventures in Home-made Play Dough

There are hundreds of blogs and websites out there that say how to make your own play dough...so I won't insult your intelligence and say that I made this one up. However, it was the first time that I have ever made it. I got the recipe from This blog, because I liked how the blogger mixed colors and scents in with the dough. The only thing I did differently was I didn't make each scent and color batch separately. Instead, I doubled the recipe and made one big batch of plain dough. Then I chose my scents and dyes and divided the dough into portions.

You can see here the dough is laying out to cool, and I've made little dividing lines on it. The scents and colors were what I had on hand in my cupboard. I didn't have any red food coloring...which was a big bummer to me and Jane, because Jane likes pink and purple (both which need the color red) and because I decided to use Peppermint oil as one of my scents, and red would have been nice for that. (I ended up leaving the peppermint scented bag of dough white...which kind of made me want to eat that Christmas candy I call Peppermint Bark...made with white chocolate and bits of broken peppermint...yeah, you know which one I mean...) The other color-scent combinations that I chose were yellow with Orange Essence. This one was my least favorite scent...the orange essence didn't cover up the smell of the homemade dough. Then there was blue with Almond Oil. This one reminded me of homemade cookies...yum! And finally, I chose green with Lavender Oil. I could have inhaled this one all day long! I could feel the stress melting immediately. Jane said this one was her favorite too.

Here are the little balls of divided dough, ready to be mixed with the scents and colors.

I then put the dough in little bags and squished and squished until they were mixed. This took a long time.

Jane tried to help me, but wasn't that successful.

She quickly grew tired of that task and was ready to play with the dough.

Here's what the dough looked like with all of the colors blended. I think they could have used a bit more dye.

Here's Jane opening her first bag of dough. Don't you just love the pure joy on her face!

Jane smelling the dough.... She liked all of the scents, and said that they all smelled good. But when I asked her what she thought they smelled like, her responses cracked me up. Here's what she said each one smelled like.

Yellow/Orange Oil: "Cabbage"

Green/Lavender Oil: "Pigs"

Blue/Almond Oil: "Puppies"

White/Peppermint Oil: "Christmas"

Hmmm......your guess is as good as mine as to HOW those things smell good (except for Christmas, of course).