treasures - crumble-dough

I love play dough and i make it for my kids a lot. I am not always the best at remembering to pack it up so it gets left on the back patio and it goes yuck, hard and like little gritty stones with one large blobby stone in the middle usually. Today was one such day and when i went to get rid of it i stopped and thought hang on, its like gravel.

I broke it up even more into tiny gritty bits, it was a bit like when your rubbing butter into flour when making scones. I put it all onto an old backing tray with a bit of an edge, any kind of shallow container tub would be great.  I had made the perfect environment for little digger machinery! boys very pleased with result sat in back yard happily constructing and demolition-ing.

he sctually has jocks on in this shot!
This child is always misplacing his shorts.

Never again will i discard the old tired hard play dough i shall instead celebrate the beginning of crumble-dough.
love sassy

Play Sushi - tuesday treasure

Step 1. Make rice play dough, i found adding about a cup of rice to the play dough worked really well, and unlike the lentils and seeds i tried in lumpy bumpy play dough the rice stayed in the mix really well (must be a shape thing). I added the cup of rice once i had combined the dough. (basic play dough recipe) Colour wise i chose white for the rice and i was inspired by wasabi its a fantastic green!

Step 2. Found some green cellophane, i cut up the cellophane and wrapped up play dough dough like sushi rolls. Decorated with coloured sticks and sequins and so on. I cut out what i thought was cute little cake looking things. Gave him some chopsticks, a pair of tongs a Asian style soup spoon and voila a tray of pretty sushi inspired food.

Step 3. let child lose on it. He unwrapped, decorated pretend ate, dished up and generally really enjoyed the imaginative food play. My floor didn't enjoy it so much but i think the littler brother was to blame for most of the mess. Who cares about mess if you get a chance to clean the windows uninterrupted I'm going to make the most of it!

Sushi play dough tick, big success.  love sassy

lumpy bumpy road playdough - teusday treasure

Ok so i like making play dough for my boys its a good busy thing, today i was inspired by one of our favourite books, roadworks by Sally Sutton pictures by Brian Lovelock.

Its a great book for boys but im sure girls would like it too, flynn knows it off by heart. Lots of diggers and noisy sounds, so i made my usual play dough and added some black lentils to to the very dark blue and some linseed's to the yellow. It was fabulous, the more you move the play dough the lentils kind of bounce out at you. It looks like the speckled road in the book and we had a lovely play together making roads, pathways for pedestrians. We put up peg signs and planted pasta flowers. All in all it was a good time.

Play dough

See its squishy

Ingredients
2 cups plain flour
4 tbls cream of tartar
2 tbls oil
1 cup of salt
food colouring
2 cups of water if cooking, 1 cup if not cooking




warning cars get bogged


Cooking your play dough will make it last longer, especially in tropics. You can cook it in a saucepan on stove, or microwave for a min, stir and nuke for another min. I have found that cooking it intensifies the colour. Or you can use water from the kettle just use one cup, keep it in the fridge it will be fine. The non- cook form is often how I make it because I know the big boy will trash it fast, and that's great because it means hes enjoying it. You can jazz up your play dough by adding glitter, or fragrant oils, I tried adding mint leaves today but i didn't add enough to make the smell strong enough, I also grated the zest of a lemon into another batch and that worked really well. I think flower petals would work great too, especially if the child was helping to make the play dough.

Some play dough play tools
cookie cutters
plastic knives, forks
strips of cardboard (bend to make bridge)
garlic press
egg cartons
coloured or not match sticks (great 4 pretend birthday cake)
Popsicle sticks
stamps
corks
old toy cars and people
leaves, sticks flowers, seed pods and pebbles
googley eyes
feathers


I would love to get more play dough ideas so please comment if your kiddies have any fave ways to play with dough, have fun.