Cinnamon Dough is THE Most Delightful Winter Craft!

 

If you want a winter pick-me-up (AND a way to finish up all that ground cinnamon you bought for holiday baking), you will be delighted with cinnamon dough.

Cinnamon dough smells amazing. It’s as easy to make and use as play dough. It dries to near-permanence with just a couple of hours in the oven. It’s been my favorite winter activity to do with my kids ever since they were tiny.

Here’s all you need to make your own batch of cinnamon dough:

• one cup of cinnamon. Yes, one CUP!!! This project is made for those people (*cough, cough* it me *cough*) who overbuy the giant spice container every winter out of a fear of somehow running out during holiday baking. The struggle IS real, though: one year I 100% found myself Googling “DIY powdered sugar” at 9pm on Christmas Eve, and I never want to relive that experience.
• up to 5 tsp aromatic spices. I like to put in those spices that I know I’m not going to use before they expire (I’m looking at you, Allspice! And YOU, Ground Cloves!).
• .5 to 1 cup applesauce. Choose the cheapest store-brand sugar-free applesauce for this, although I won’t judge you if you find yourself panic-emptying a couple of pouches because you simply cannot go back to the freaking grocery store one more time today. Once upon a time, I made my kids a batch of play dough using organic flour because that’s what I had on hand. It wasn’t my finest moment, but I DID get to stay in my jammy pants!
• cookie sheet.

Step 1: Mix all ingredients.

Add all the dry ingredients to a bowl, then stir to combine.

Starting with 1/2 cup applesauce, mix/knead the applesauce into the other ingredients in batches. I’ve never figured out exactly why my cinnamon dough requires a slightly different amount of applesauce every year–is it the humidity? The age/variety of spices? It’s not the applesauce itself, because I always use that exact kind in the photo–but indeed, I make this cinnamon dough every single winter, and every single winter I have to play the exact amount of applesauce by ear.

You’re looking for a consistency like any other dough in your life–not crumbly, not sticky. If you’re working with younger kids, err on the side of making the dough a little wet and sticky, because a crumbly dough that doesn’t hold together with ease is almost immediately frustrating to little kids.

And yes, I’m sorry, but you will have to get your hands into it. It’s dough! If it’s any consolation, though, cinnamon is pretty nice for your skin!

Step 2: Decorate!

You can sculpt with this cinnamon dough just like you would with any dough, but my family’s favorite way to enjoy it has always been to get out the cookie cutters and make ornaments and garlands.

To make your own cinnamon dough ornaments, roll the dough no thicker than 1/4″, then cut with cookie cutters. Make a small hole for stringing onto a garland using the tip of a chopstick, or a larger hole for attaching an ornament hanger using a straw.

If you’re making a fiddly design, you can roll the dough directly onto parchment paper, then move your design, parchment paper and all, onto the cookie sheet for baking.

Just beware of trying to work with the dough when it’s cold from the refrigerator. It’s fine to store the dough in the fridge for a couple of weeks, but it will cooperate a LOT better at room temperature.

Step 3: Bake.

While you’re working with the dough, preheat the oven to around 200 degrees (depending on my oven’s capabilities over the years, I’ve used temps anywhere between 200-250 degrees with similar results. One of these days, I’ll even get around to experimenting with my dehydrator!).

This dough won’t expand, so don’t worry about placement; just set them onto an ungreased cookie sheet and set the time for an hour.

After one hour, I like to check on my ornaments and flip them. See in the above photo how the centers of the larger ornaments that I just flipped over are darker? That’s the bottom middle that hasn’t dried yet, so flipping them over and putting them back in the oven lets them dry out evenly.

After a couple of hours, the ornaments should start to be ready, depending on how big they are. I start to check on them about every 20 minutes, removing the ones that are bone-dry whenever I check. I don’t really enjoy a lot of hands-on kitchen stuff, so I’m always VERY excited when that last ornament is dry and I can finally turn the oven off!

Step 4: Attach ornament hangers.

This year, my teenager and I combined these cinnamon dough ornaments with dried grapefruit slices to make some lovely (and lovely-smelling!) winter garlands that we hope to keep on display through February.

I tied loops of embroidery floss through the holes on the other ornaments, and we put them right onto our tree.

With careful storage, these cinnamon dough ornaments should last for multiple years. A couple of years ago, after probably a decade of making them yearly and storing the survivors (it’s hard to be a Christmas tree ornament in this house!) with our other ornaments in the garage during the off-seasons, all of our cinnamon dough ornaments came out of storage a little moldy. They must have gotten damp or come into contact with something that ruined them, but it remains a mystery!

But whether you try to store them (I think I *will* try again this year!) or simply compost them in the Spring, or even just enjoy the dough as a process-oriented sensory experience and don’t keep them at all, I think this cinnamon dough will be a delightful addition to your winter craft projects!

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How to Dye Pasta to Make Sensory Materials

Pretty much the last family activity that we did before taking the kids to college was an evening of making sensory materials together.

You know, as you do!

I'd had the idea that my preschool niece might like some of the same homemade sensory materials that my own kids had enjoyed at her age. We made her slime (although my kids actually played with oobleck, not slime, throughout their preschool years, you might remember that my younger kid went through a BIG slime phase as a tween and still has the recipe memorized), play dough, sand dough, cloud dough, dyed Epsom salts, and a couple of colors of this dyed pasta.

Out of all of those options, the pasta is the easiest! It takes just a few minutes of hands-on time, spread out over the course of a full day. Here's how to make it:

Materials

To make this sensory material, you will need:

• dry pasta. The pasta that you use is limited only by your imagination, your budget, and the size of the jar you plan to use. Rotini and elbow macaroni were perennial favorites with my kids, but bowties and shells also turn out exceptionally cute. Star pasta is a splurge but would be adorable, and spaghetti would be cool-looking but unwieldy to dye and delicate when finished.
• liquid food coloring or liquid watercolors. I use the snot out of our liquid watercolors, and used them for this particular project, but before I knew such a thing existed I made many fine and colorful batches of dyed pasta with cheap liquid food coloring. 
• old jars. I've always used glass jars, as in old spaghetti sauce or salsa jars, and never plastic, but I don't see why plastic wouldn't work.
• rubbing alcohol. You need this because it's a non-water-based solvent that can distribute the dye without dissolving the pasta. Some of my hippier friends buy super-high-proof organic vodka to make their own disinfectants, though, so if you like, I bet you can use that!
• newspaper, brown paper bags, cardboard, etc. You want something to spread the pasta out on to dry, ideally something you can toss in the recycling bin when you're done.

How to Dye the Dried Pasta

Pour dried pasta into a jar, filling it no more than halfway. Check out this old photo I found of my adorable older darling completing this step. She looks like she might be five?

Five was a really great age for that kid. Actually, though, twenty is turning out to also be a great year for her!

Add enough rubbing alcohol to just cover the bottom of the jar, then add the dye. Put the lid on and shake it around until the dye is evenly distributed, then add more dye as desired until the pasta looks about as saturated as you want it to be.

Here's the part you have to remember: put the jars on a table or counter you frequently walk by, and then for the rest of the day, every time you pass the jars, agitate them and shake them around for a few seconds to further distribute the dye and unstick any pasta bits.

After a few hours of that, dump out the jas and spread the pasta out in an even layer on your blotting paper:

Leave the pasta to finish drying out at least overnight, or even as long as a full day:

Your blotting paper gets pretty messy, so that's why you want something you can toss!

When the pasta has finished drying, kids can play with it right away, or you can store it in deli containers at room temperature. Look how cute it looks combined with all the other sensory materials in my niece's present stash!

Kids can simply play with this pasta, of course, but it also makes a great addition to a play kitchen or mud kitchen, or to a pretend construction site. Dump trucks love to drive around pink elbow pasta! 

And, of course, you can do art with it, especially making mosaics with different types and colors of pastas. You know you want your own pasta mosaic masterpiece hung on your wall!

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DIY Sewn Finger Labyrinth

 

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

This finger labyrinth is a satisfying (and SILENT!) fidget toy.

And you can sew it completely from stash!

If you or someone you love also loves fidget toys, then you are going to be thrilled with this finger labyrinth! It’s a totally silent fidget, hallelujah, that’s also super portable and delightfully fidgety. And depending on whether or not you’ve got a spare marble lying around, you can sew this finger maze entirely from stash.

Here’s what you need:

• 1″ graph paper or ruler/stencil. I thrifted a ream of this ages ago and its been endlessly useful, but you can also simply print a 1″ graph paper pdf. To transfer the maze pattern to your fabric, a clear gridded quilting ruler will come in VERY handy, but you can also do the work with a regular ruler and an eye for accuracy.
• fabric, 2″ larger than your planned maze by length and width. If you’ve got sensory particulars, pay attention to your fabric choice here. I, for instance, ONLY like this finger maze in flannel, but one of my teenagers refers to flannel as, and I quote, “a sensory nightmare.” Ahem. Whatever fabric you choose, a novelty print is a fun choice.
• matching/contrasting thread. I like to sew the maze lines in contrasting thread to add interest to the toy, but you do you.
• fabric markers. I am obsessed with Pilot Frixion pens for marking on fabric. The ink irons away, which makes it, for me, even more convenient than wash-away ink. You DO have to be careful using it on darker fabrics, however, as sometimes after you iron there will be a light mark in its place. When in doubt, do a test first!
• marble. I’m steadily stealing the marbles from my kids’ old marble mazes. Hungry Hungry Hippos is also a good place to find marbles, or swing through your local thrift store.

And here’s how to sew your maze!

Step 1: Pre-test your marble vs. stitched channel setup.

Before you dive into maze-making, double-check that your marble will fit through the maze you’re planning. To do this, sew a few short stitched channels, perhaps in .75″, 1″, 1.25″, and 1.5″ widths, then pass your marble through each to see which feels the best. I’ve found that I vastly prefer a 1″ channel for all the standard marble sizes, which vary by only a millimeter or two, but you should make your maze the way that YOU want!

If you do decide to change the width of your maze paths, change all the other measurements, too, to match. You can even customize your graph paper grid size to make drawing the maze pattern easier!

Step 2: Draw your maze pattern.

Technically, these are labyrinths, since there’s only one path from beginning to end and the task is just to get the marble along the path. But if you want to make it a maze with dead ends, go for it!

Have fun drawing your maze just the way you want it, making sure that you use up all your maze space and that you’ve left openings equal to the width of the maze path whenever you turn a corner. That’s where working with graph paper really helps!

Step 2: Cut and sew the maze base.

Cut two pieces of fabric that are 2″ longer by both length and width than your maze pattern. In the image above, you can see that I cut my graph paper, which is in 1″ grids, to the overall fabric size so I can use it as a template. Or I could have just cut my fabric to be 8″x10″ to accommodate my 6″x8″ maze.

If you’re using novelty fabric, it’s fun to fussy cut it to make sure that any especially cute elements will be prominent.

Put your two fabric pieces right sides together, then sew a .25″ seam around the perimeter, leaving a hole in one side for turning.

Turn the fabric right sides out, use a blunt pencil or similar tool to push out the corners, and iron flat. Fold in the raw edges at the opening to match the rest of the seam, and iron to crease. You’ll close that hole later.

Step 3: Draw and stitch the maze.

Center the maze pattern on one side of the fabric–here is where your quilting ruler will come in QUITE handy!

I find it easiest to draw the perimeter of the maze first directly onto the fabric with my heat-erasable pen, then use the quilting ruler to draw in the lines that make up the maze path. Measure and draw the lines as accurately as you’re able to, because it would suck if you mis-measured and ended up with a path too narrow for your marble.

Speaking of that marble–pop it inside the maze through the opening as soon as you’ve finished drawing out your pattern! Technically you can leave it until just before you stitch the opening shut, but I just know that if I do that, then I’ll forget it entirely. I’d rather sew around the marble a bit while also reassuring myself that it’s there!

Step 4: Edge stitch to close the opening and add a second barrier.

Edge stitching around the perimeter of the fabric is enough to close the opening, but I’m paranoid about kids and marbles, and I also like this step because it adds one more stitched barrier to keep that marble from escaping.

If you really want to go ham on making that barrier, you can even do a zigzag or other decorative stitch there. I did this on the finger mazes that I’m giving to my four-year-old niece, but I did plain edge stitching, in a thread color to match the maze path, on the ones for my teenagers. The straight line in the maze path color looks a lot nicer, too.

These sewn fidgets turn out quite well for something so simple! I like the 6″x8″ maze to give you something to really fiddle with, but I also make these as small as 4″x4″ and they’re still satisfying to play with.

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How-to: DIY Color Viewers

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World in 2015.

Got a kid who's in love with color? These DIY color viewers will help her see the world in a whole new light! 

These color viewers are a project that is suitable for a wide range of ages. Toddlers and preschoolers will incorporate them into their sensory play, while older kids (who do still love their sensory play, of course!) will be able to use them for a variety of scientific observations and experiments--colored shadows, color mixing, the properties of light, the properties of the eye, etc. 

 Also? They're just plain fun! 

 Here's how to make your own set of color viewers: 

  1. Gather ample cardboard to upcycle. You'll need two pieces of cardboard for each color viewer. I have a horrifying collection of used shipping boxes that I was pretty thrilled to raid for this project, but cereal or cracker boxes, moving boxes, or my most common go-to, cardboard record album covers, will also work well. 

  2. Cut cardboard to size. This size will depend on the size of the cardboard pieces that you're using; to minimize waste, I cut my cardboard to the largest size that I could--about 5.25"x8.5". Cut two pieces for every color viewer that you want to make. 

  3. Cut a window into the cardboard. Measure 1" in on all sides, and cut out to make a frame. 

  4. Cut the cellophane to size. As with my DIY 3D glasses tutorial, it's the colored cellophane that really makes this project. Measure the window that you've cut into the cardboard, then cut each piece of cellophane, one per color viewer, 1" longer than that measurement by both length and width. 

  5. Glue the cellophane to one cardboard frame. Lay one cardboard frame wrong-side-up (for instance, I put the outsides of my scuffed and labeled shipping boxes to the inside of my viewers), then run a line of hot glue along the entire perimeter of the window. Carefully center and set the cellophane down over the window, and press in place. 

  6. Glue the second cardboard frame to the first. Run another line of hot glue around the frame, then center a second cardboard frame and set it down on top of the first, right-side-up. These color viewers are sturdy enough for even toddler play, but if you've got a smaller kid who still likes to gnaw, you'll probably want to cover the outside edges of the cardboard frame with clear packing tape so that the kid's saliva doesn't soften and wear away the cardboard. 

Older kids will mostly do this, though: 

 Then she looked at her sister through it, informed her that she was green and therefore made of puke, the sister screamed in outrage and began to chase her, and I might have possibly gone inside and locked the door.

An Ode to Geomags

Note: No, there are no weekly work plans this week! Near the end of last week, I began to suspect that in my own desire to stay busy to distract myself from my grief over Pappa, I've been over-scheduling the children, as well. I mean, I certainly have less time to feel sad when there's a full day of schoolwork every day AND an hours-long field trip AND a playdate AND a class or extracurricular to drive to AND some time spent shilling for cookie orders on the way there or back.

And the children, my good sports, did actually manage to get most of their schoolwork done, even so, but I began to see them gently reacting to my over-planning in probably the best way that a child can: with play. I'd go to tell them that it was time to begin schoolwork for the day, to find one or both deeply immersed in their toys, and I'd back off. Hours later, there they'd still be, happily playing. You know that I rarely disturb a focused child, so it was certainly the most efficient and least confrontational way for them to get more time for themselves.

We're going to keep that up this week, I think. I'm still going to require the kids to do their math every day, and work on their memory work (Mandarin started again last week!), and I have a selection of odd little projects--another Nature documentary that I've been wanting them to watch, thank-you letters for Christmas presents, extension recipes from Your Kids: Cooking, homemade Valentines for an exchange next week, etc.--of which I'll ask the children to choose one and I'll choose one for them each day, and, of course, there are still plenty of extracurriculars and loads of Girl Scout cookie selling, but ideally, this project-focused week will give us a chance to rest, reset, and refocus on next week.

One of the toys that was played with the most last week was the Geomags. I think that I've written about these before, and that's because they're perennial favorites, one of the few toys that have been loved right out of the box and universally for years.

They're pricey as hell, but totally worth it for us, since they're also played with so well. Every now and then, I'll add to the kids' collection for some holiday or other--the younger kid, for instance, received the pink Geomags set one Christmas, and I think another Christmas brought them the professional set. Here's basically what we have so far:



Several weeks ago, the kids became interested in using the Geomags to build anti-gravity and "perpetual motion" machines, inspired in great part by this anti-gravity spinner and this perpetual motion machine. The younger kid worked on building a triangular prism that would sit suspended inside this cube construction--

--while the older kid actually got her anti-gravity spinner to work!

The kids are both also really interested in building pyramids--when we first got these Geomags, and for years afterwards, they'd build a simple pyramid that they could transform into a "scooter dog," and they'd make it and then play pretend games with it. I haven't seen scooter dog in a long time, but I have seen several of these lying around:

Another interesting thing that I've noticed lately is the younger kid's desire to sort the metal marbles on top of the colored panels. I'm not sure what she's exploring with this, but she does it over and over, so something fascinating must be going on with it in her brain:

For the kids' next birthdays, I'm pretty sure that I'll be giving at least one of them a new Geomag set, as I've been noticing that the kids have sometimes been using ALL of the Geomags in their constructions. Here are my top contenders:

Right now, coloring books are also on the birthday wish-lists, as right this second, finished with two brief playdates with friends (while their moms and I sorted Girl Scout cookies) and our volunteer gig, procrastinating on her math, and about to be asked to help me make dinner, the younger kid is once again sitting at the table, listening to Harriet the Spy on audiobook and coloring.

She's just as busy as she needs to be.