The Best Homemade Play Dough Recipe

2011 play dough creation

I don't remember the last time my kids genuinely played with play dough for fun, but I still make this homemade play dough recipe almost every week.

I sell the play dough, undyed or dyed the color of your choice, by the pound in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, but I don't see why you can't simply have the recipe so you can make your own!

2008 play dough creation. I added glitter to the blue one!

The recipe makes about one pound, three ounces of the softest, squishiest play dough you'll ever feel. It's reluctant to dry out, it holds shape well, it's soft enough to feel awesome on your hands but firm enough that playing with it strengthens those little grip and finger muscles, and it dyes like a dream. 

And it takes VERY little time to make! Certainly a LOT less time than it takes to drive to Wal-mart and back for Play Doh!

Another 2011 play dough creation. 

Here are the ingredients you need:

• 1 cup flour. I try to use the cheapest flour I can find for this recipe, usually bleached all-purpose. However, when my kids were tiny and sometimes "needed" play dough right that minute, I used to use whatever flour I had on hand. I've used unbleached flour, wheat flour, and on one personally very sad occasion, organic flour (grr! It's so expensive!), and the play dough always came out great. I know different flours will change the necessary water content, though, so if you're trying for something specific, you'll probably want to experiment a bit.
• 1/2 cup salt. The gold standard for this is, again, the cheapest iodized salt you can find. A couple of times I've run out and used salt with a larger grain, and although it worked, you can definitely see and feel the larger grains in the finished play dough. Cheapo iodized salt, however, will make your play dough as smooth as butter!
• 2 tsp cream of tartar. Cream of tartar aids consistency and stability, so you can skip it if you need to, but the play dough won't be as nice in texture or as long-lived. 
• 1 tbsp oil. Again, any oil works for this recipe, but I like to use the cheapest available. Canola is the cheapest, but if all I have on hand is olive, I'm just as happy with the finished play dough. You'd think that the color of olive oil would affect the tone of the finished white play dough... but it doesn't!
• 1 cup water. 
• dye (optional). If you want to dye your entire batch a single color, dump it into the pot with the rest of the ingredients. Otherwise, knead the dye into the finished play dough. I have tried every dye I can think of, from the cheapest to the nicest store-bought food dyes, homemade and store-bought natural dyes, liquid watercolors, and powdered tempera. For color saturation, my favorite BY FAR is powdered tempera! It will stain your hands while you're kneading it into the play dough but it won't stain your hands while you're playing with it. It also lightens the play dough in a way that feels absolutely magical and wreaks absolute hell on my ability to fit a full pound of play dough into the containers I sell it in. 

Step 1: Add all ingredients to a single pot.

Just dump it all  in!

Step 2: Cook over medium heat, stirring continually. 

This is time-consuming, because you want to cook the play dough low and slow so you don't scorch it, and you have to stir it continuously to keep it from sticking to the pot. I've never timed myself, but I do get through several minutes of a podcast or streaming show while I stir.

When the play dough loses its gummy appearance and wants to ball up, remove it from the heat and remove the play dough from the pot.

Put the pot to soak in the sink before you even try to wash it, because flour + water = glue!

Step 3: Knead until smooth.

When you dump the play dough out onto your work surface, it will look like this:

As soon as it's cool enough to touch, knead it until it looks like this!

Here's the final weight of my finished play dough:

It's ready to play with immediately, and will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator in an airtight container. When my kids were little, I'd toss it when it started looking dirty from their play, but also toss it immediately if it smells rancid or the texture and consistency change for the worse. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Science: Make a Model Landfill, Fill it with Municipal Solid Waste, and Try Not to Poison Your Community

AP Environmental Science has SO MANY fabulous possibilities for labs and other hands-on activities. I am absolutely loving mentoring this study for Will, and hauling Syd along for the ride!

This particular hands-on activity comes from AP Environmental Science Unit 8: Aquatic and Terrestrial Pollution. For Syd, it also works for Honors Biology, using CK-12 Biology Chapter 12: Communities and Populations as a spine. Will read Living in the Environment Chapter 21: Solid and Hazardous Waste as her spine.

The main idea is that currently, there is no way to completely rid ourselves of solid waste, and therefore, it's important to find the most efficient, least environmentally impactful method to store municipal solid waste.

For that, you need a landfill! But what kind of landfill should you make? Ideally, your landfill should hold all of the municipal solid waste that your community produces, should have a barrier in place to keep all leachate from contaminating the ground or water, and should be capped to prevent scavengers and wind from spreading waste and rainfall from entering the landfill and therefore becoming contaminated, as well.

Here's a good diagram of a landfill.

Designing your dream landfill, building a model of it, and then testing that model is a fun STEM activity and hands-on science enrichment. I planned out a more casual version of this lesson, and the kids loved it!

The basic idea is that the kids each get a plastic bin, to which they add a 1"-2" sand layer and a 1"-2" soil layer. I provided the following supplies:

• Monopoly houses
• more sand and soil
• popsicle sticks (these are a trap!)
• homemade play dough (already portioned, and definitely not enough to solely use to make a landfill
• paper
• plastic grocery bags

I filled a pint Mason jar with cotton balls, then added green food coloring and water to the 2-cup line. This is our municipal solid waste!

The kids' challenge was the following:

1. Using the provided supplies, create a community that includes a landfill. The community should have at least a dozen houses.
2. The landfill should be impervious to rain and scavengers entering it, and impervious to solids and liquids leaving it. 
3. The landfill should hold at least one cup of municipal solid waste, which includes both solids and liquids.
4. The landfill should be able to survive a rainstorm and high winds without destruction or leakage.

Will had already read her AP Environmental Science chapter and watched most of the relevant videos in our AP Environmental Science playlist, so she had an advantage over Syd, who had only looked at the landfill anatomy diagram and read about solid waste storage more generally in her CK-12 Biology chapter. Regardless of background knowledge, though, this is still a fun engineering challenge, and I think you can see on the kids' faces how much fun they had with it!

Syd prepares the liner for her landfill.

Will falls into the trap by using popsicle sticks. They're a terrible choice for building a leak-free landfill!

At times, I felt more like a preschool teacher mediating children's work with sensory bins. After a long winter, the kids seemed to adore getting their hands dirty!

All those popsicle sticks! 

Syd's landfill is far larger than she needs for this challenge. I appreciate the room for growth, but it's going to suck trying to keep that whole landfill leak-free.

We add one cup of sopping wet cotton balls and green water.

Next, Will has to cover it and build a cap.

Popsicle sticks AGAIN!!!

Alas! The landfill has sprung a leak!

The engineer observes the problem and starts troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, in the next town over, the world's largest landfill receives its first cup of municipal solid waste.

Oh, dear! This community has just experienced a terrible rainstorm, and the cap on their landfill has taken a LOT of damage!

Syd adds the last dregs of municipal solid waste to her community's landfill.

Will the landfill hold?!?

It... will not. See that leakage? Syd has apparently foregone a liner entirely and instead relied just on the sand to hold the leachate.

This is a disaster! She's delighted.

If the landfill is this leaky already, what on earth is going to happen when it rains?

Wow. That's an environmental disaster, all right!

There seems to be a LOT of leakage. I wonder what the underlying ground looks like?

Oh, no! The soil of the entire community has been contaminated!

Chaos ensues, as the goddess of this little community seemingly decides to just give up and turn evil:

Will, her own landfill safely recapped with plastic, thought that Syd's crash-and-burn trainwreck of a landfill was HILARIOUS.

That plastic cap, though? Worked perfectly! Perhaps her community can take in the survivors from the other plastic bin.

Lessons were definitely learned about the importance of a leak-free landfill!

At the conclusion of this challenge, the kids washed the Monopoly houses and returned them to the game, threw away the play dough and plastic bags, and then dumped the rest of their landfill community--sand, soil, popsicle sticks, and cotton balls--into our compost. 

If you wanted to extend this activity, you could try to design and test landfills that deal with a variety of environmental challenges: a tornado or hurricane using a fan, a flood using more water, an earthquake using a shaker table, a population growth using more cups of municipal solid waste, etc. For us, though, this was a super fun way to always remember the importance of good design in a landfill, and what can happen when that design fails.

And the next day, we took a field trip to a REAL landfill!!!

My Latest: Bookmarks, Play Dough, and Reusable Tri-Folds

My tutorials on Crafting a Green World this week all came from projects that I had to do, anyway. I made another couple of batches of rainbow play dough for an etsy order, reminding me that I'd never before shared my fool-proof play dough recipe on CAGW:

My secret ingredient is powdered tempera. It makes the play dough as vivid as a crayon and as light as fluff.

Helping the children prepare for their Girl Scout cookie booths, I also realized that I'd never shared the long-promised tutorial to make the reusable chalkboard tri-fold display boards that we rely so much on for so many things:

As part of their Girl Scout cookie booth, the kids wanted to make bookmarks from old cookie boxes to give away as "prizes" to customers who bought at least five boxes of cookies, and their bookmarks turned out so cute that I posted them!

I'm pretty impressed with myself that I managed to whip out THREE tutorials during one of my busiest weeks.

Next week, I've got round-ups in the works for rainbow crafts for St. Patrick's Day and train-themed crafts just because, and maybe, just maybe, I'll have another leotard or cape-related tute, because although I've been deeply focused on Girl Scout cookie business so far this month, I MUST buckle down on the kids' Trashion/Refashion Show garments--I've only got a couple of weeks left to get them done, photographed, and submitted!!!

Hershey, Pennsylvania, to Easton, Pennsylvania

Did we hit all the kid-friendly factory-esque stops or what?!? The day after Hershey, we nuked some oatmeal, packed up the car, hopped in, and drove straight to Crayola Experience:

crosswalk between the parking garage and Crayola Experience

Admission is VERY expensive (thank goodness for coupons!), but to be fair, you do come home with bags full of stuff at the end, all included in the cost, including crayons in custom-designed wrappers--




--and markers that you can watch being made, complete with your choice of color combination:


There's a factory show during which you can watch a demonstration of crayons being made (including receiving one of the crayons at the end!), but everything else is hands-on:

You can paint with melted crayons--


--including your finger tips, if you're that brave, I suppose:

You can draw with glowing markers in a dark room:

You can make spin art with more melted crayons in a complicated (and often broken, a docent admitted to me) wax melting and paper plate spinning machine:

Figuring out how to recreate this project is a new obsession of mine.

You can paint in a sunny spot--




--and,  in case you're worried that you'll have to carry around a wet painting all day, you can send it through the dryer:

You can make various craft projects (a puzzle and a treasure box, on the day that we were there):

You can make yourself into a coloring page--




--and color it to make yourself look funny--


--or your sister:

I'm framing this picture that Sydney colored of Willow. 

I'm probably not framing this one of Sydney that Willow colored.

You can decorate sculptures with dry erase markers:

And if you've got any leftover tokens, you can exchange them for Model Magic:

I splurged on a couple of more complicated kits for the girls to put together at my friend's place later.

Thank goodness that the Crayola Experience also had tons of active, gross motor activities, too. I possibly have two of the more crafts-oriented kids on the planet, but I doubt that they could sit around for a full day doing nothing but art activities. Now, a couple of art activities, a visit to the two-storey indoor playground--

--a couple of art activities, a trip outdoors for a picnic lunch and a good climb all over the crayon statues, a couple of art activities, an art activity that also involves running around and playing with your art--

--a couple of art activities, some time messing around with some big, open-ended manipulatives--

--a couple of art activities, a while goofing around on the interactive floor--

(we stayed in this room for a LONG time, until Willow could predict the cycling of each of the different programs, and could master each one)

--a couple of final art activities, a trip to the gift shop, where Sydney bought a Tinkerbell coloring book and I bought Twistables, Model Magic, and purple bubbles, a trip to the bathroom, and a walk to the car, where I got the girls settled, made sandwiches and passed out fruit and strawberry milk and granola bars, called my friend to get his address, programmed it into the GPS, fiddled with the GPS for an excruciatingly long time until I could make it route me around New York City, discovered that I couldn't find my planner, looked for my planner, called Matt to ask if he could call our last hotels and ask about the planner, and then finally remembered that the garage had one of those walk-up kiosks to pay for your parking, which it had probably been at least twenty minutes since I had visited, and if I didn't book it they'd probably make me pay even more to get out of the place.

Next stop: New Haven, and the Yale Peabody Museum!