Make Some Homemade Play Dough!

What is more fun that play dough? You get to build pretty much anything you want with play dough and if you don’t feel like building something you can just squish it, smoosh it and roll it into balls and hot dog shapes for stress relief. Everybody knows that you can go down to down to your local retail store or amazon.com to buy some play dough, but not everyone knows that you can make your own! My sister-in-law is a kindergarten teacher and she makes it all the time for her classroom.

As part of our build simple toys initiative justbuildstuff.com is going to share her recipe with our community. And make a batch ourselves for play and testing purposes. We start with a materials shopping list, note that this recipe requires a lot of salt. I did not notice until I started adding ingredients that I did not have enough salt and I had to empty every salt shaker I had in order to complete the recipe.

• Flour- 3 cups
• Cream of tartar- 1TB.
  
• Salt- 1 1/2 cups
• Vegetable Oil- 2TB.
  
• Water- 3 cups
• Food coloring- As Needed
  

To begin I dumped all of the ingredients into a saucepan. As you can see in the photos below I should have selected a larger saucepan, but the one I used worked.

After adding all of the ingredients, I set the stove top to medium heat and began stirring the concoction. I added yellow and red food coloring to make orange play dough. I don’t know if I stirred more than I needed to, but I really got a work out stirring this stuff. After about five minutes or so of stirring, the dough mixture
began to get very thick and pull to the center as shown in the photo below. At this point I removed the saucepan from the burner for it to cool.

When the dough was cool enough to touch, I squished around some clumps of it and laid it out on wax paper for additional cooling.

After the dough was completely cool, I squished and kneaded it again and bagged it into freezer bags.

Then after waiting about an hour my family and I played with some freshly made play dough. The only real notable difference with the
home made play dough is that you will get a salty residue on your hands while playing, but the home made play dough seems to
last longer than the commercial version before it dries out!