Following on from What Babies Really Want To Play With, you'll note there's a reoccurring theme, that of Moomin's passion to empty things, all the things, every things. Bags, purses, packets, shelves, cupboards and her personal favourite, a packet of baby wipes.  Now I could fork out £20 or so and buy a shiny plastic toy designed to put things in and take them out again, or I could just be a cheap skate and make one because, newsflash, she actually couldn't give a toss what it looks like, it's the act she likes.

I had copious amounts of old cloth wipes that we no longer use (thanks to the lovely Cheeky Wipes that have replaced them!) They're just small baby flannels that you can buy in packs of 5 or 6 from the pound shop.  The Dude had recently got some new trainers, so I wrestled the box from him, tapes it together, made a slot in the top (and taped round this too) and stuffed it with the flannels (and a load of used gift cards, don't ask!) Voila.  Best game ever.  She can now empty to her heart's content, granted she doesn't want to put them back yet but that's all part of the game, if you attempt to refill them it's a race against the Moomin as she crawls at hyper speed to empty them as fast as you put them back!

The money saved?  Can be put into the fund for a trip out somewhere, after all, memories are priceless.

Tutorial: white clay Christmas ornaments

I'd love to post one of those pinterest winning style posts on picture perfect Christmas crafting only this is me and I can't craft.  We excel at the imperfect.  We're messy, noisy and a bit wobbly.   We balls things up.  A lot.  We're clumsy and impatient. 

So how about some real life imperfect crafting that's craptastic to but ours?

I'm not a huge fan on salt dough especially the color.  Mine always dries bubbly and curls up.  So we use White clay .

All you need is:

❄1 cup of bicarbonate Soda
❄1/2 cup of corn flour
❄3/4 cup of warm water

Optional extras:

❄Glitter
❄peppermint essence

The method is simple too. Mix all the ingredients together and heat in a pan over a medium heat until it starts to bubble and stick together. 

The process isn't immediate and goes through several stages before it's 'done' when it starts to look like play dough you can take it off the heat.

With our first batch we added irredescent glitter to give a snowy sparkle throughout the dough and some peppermint essence to give it a festive fragrance.  We added this part way through cooking though you could add it afterwards too.

The mixture will be really hot so you need to let it cool down.

Once it's cool down knead it until it's soft and pliable.  Roll out then get cutting.

You can dry them in the oven or leave them to air dry.

Firstly we made some pretty snowflakes which we pressed some random gem shapes we found lurking in the cupboard of crafty doom aka the craft graveyard.  These looked infinitely better in my head.  You need to push the gems in before you dry them.  If, like us, you even fail at this simple task you'll need glue. .. For when they're dry and half the gems fall off.

Next we did Christmas trees.

This time we pushed sequins in.  Once again many of these little buggers fell off and I had to glue them back on. Messily.  With much swearing.

Reindeer,  something else that looked awesome in my head.  Not so much by the time we'd finished with them.  I sprayed them with gold spray paint, nearly gassing us all in the process.  The glittery parts and drug addled eyes were added in haste with Moomin in a sling on my front somewhat obscuring my view whilst I multi tasked cooking Tea.  I can't even blame the result on Thing Two and Three Dude as all they did was cut out the shapes.

The ghost was going to be Olaf. Did I mention I'm artistically inept?  It was supposed to be The Dude's footprint.....

For what it's worth if you want to do footprints and handprints you need to roll the dough a lot thicker than I did.  Oops. However The Dude rather enjoyed standing on the kitchen table.

The Eagle eyed ones amongst you may have noticed handprints on the baking sheet.

I burned them.

To a crisp.

Black and smoking.

Shut up.

If you want a much classier (& successful ) tutorial on white clay ornaments do visit the wonderful  Imagination Tree . Theirs are beautiful.  I'm not envious at all.  Honest. 

Ours however were made with love (& profanity )

The Great Ice Rescue

I'm not terribly good at the whole play thing, even less so when I'm in pain and heavily pregnant.  The only upside is that when I do set up some kind of sensory or messy play The Spawn think it's amazing.

Thing One is out on his surprise early birthday celebration at Blackpool Pleasure Beach for the day with The Husband and Thing Two is having a sleep over at The Grandparents to minimise sulking.  So that just leaves The Preschooler and I.  He has a huge capacity for in-depth independent play pausing only for snacks, cuddles, a chat and a bit of tv yet even still he misses fighting like cat and dog with his siblings when they're not here.  So today seemed the perfect time for him to finally take part in The Great Ice Rescue, something that's been in the freezer for best part of a week.

It's incredibly easy to set up.  I grabbed a roasting tin and plonked a load of figures in it such as Moshlings, dinosaurs, fairies and other such things then poured over water mixed with blue food colouring.  This was then put in the freezer and left.  Granted, The Spawn are nosy little gits and kept opening the drawer to peek so I now have a rather fetching blue freezer drawer too.

So The Preschooler could manipulate it easier I plonked it upside down on the path and poured a jug of warm water over the roasting tin so that it lifted off, essentially leaving a frozen block with plenty of people trapped inside.

The Preschooler is crazy about rescuing things and being a hero so he was told his mission, that all these things had been trapped in a big ice storm and only he can save them.  He was given a medicine syringe, a small measuring scoop, a wooden meat tenderising hammer and a jug of warm water.  The rules were given that he wasn't allowed to just tip the jug of water over the ice block it had to be added bit by bit and that he could only smash the hammer gently to avoid hurting his fingers and flying ice.

Seeing as i'm pretty much useless physically at the moment I was able to just sit on a chair outside near him and watch.  We talked about how things freeze and we talked about how things melt.  He got to physically see it happen as he was making it happen.  He experimented and found that without trying to melt the ice a little with water first the hammer didn't do much, yet the more water he added the easier the hammer could break through the ice.  He naturally manipulated the freed yet still ice encased toys and gently hacked away at the ice whilst realising if he dunked them in the jug it came away easier.

I feared he'd grow bored before the ice even started to melt enough to rescue anything as obviously hot water would have been too hazardous so he only had warm water at his disposal yet he was fascinated and very determined.  You could virtually see the knowledge of the melting process and logistics of freeing things flow through him as he played.  I loved how he spoke to them Fireman Sam style and how he naturally adjusted his strength and dexterity between the brazen hammer smashing and the more delicate chiseling.

Naturally his favourate part was the hammer and once everyone had gained their freedom he set about smashing the remaining ice to smithereens with huge delighted whoops and shouts of 'SMASHHHHHHH!'

All in all this was such a simple activity and yet he thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was learning, problem solving, role play and sensory play all in one.  It was virtually mess free (though i'm sporting attractive blue ankles from splashes of melted ice!) as it was all outside too and minimal clearing up as the ice will just melt away.

Definitely one to try again in the future.

Fun With Water Beads

If there's one thing the local town has in abundance, it's pound shops.  They appear to be everywhere.  I'll admit to rather liking them at times, obviously some are considerably more palatable than others.  Some are a sweaty dark caverns of doom with over stacked shelves looming over you with tit and tat that you'll never need yet judging by the price you convince yourself you might need it, someday.  Yet others are simply bargain central.  I can't for the life of me remember the name of it yet there's one in particular that is light, airy, tidy and well presented.  The perfect stop for those pesky hairslides that Thing Two inevitably loses, all the time.  I refuse to fork out extortionate amounts for them when I can get 30 for £1!  Their six packs of baby flannels make excellent reusable nappy wipes and it's a little haven for cheap craft and art bits and bats for The Spawn.  It also means, after a boring shopping trip we can afford to treat The Preschooler.  He easily finds something he'd like in there every single visit and at a pound a pop, why not?

On our last visit there I was drawn to something I've been tempted to try for some time, water beads!  I'm not one for popping into florist supply shops on a whim and I never quite got round to ordering them online so this seemed almost like an omen.  I'll admit to being a trifle suspicious at what we'd get for a £1 so the skeptical side of me purchased two boxes just in case.

It's a rather simple process, you simply add the minuscule little packets of colourful doo-dahs to water.  They came with their own test tubes with the suggestion you fill it with a colour of your choice.  Sod that.  It would be akin to picking out a particular colour from cake sprinkles.  Never to do something by halves we opted instead to dump both packs into a large bowl of water.  The idea is you then observe as they grow.    I'm never quite sure who has the least spectacular attention span, myself or The Preschooler, regardless, neither of us were bored enough to stare at a bowl of water for longer than a few minutes.  Granted they did grow, yet they seemed to stop producing a deflated 'is that it?!' reaction from the both of us.  To say it was underwhelming would be an understatement.  I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt as the instructions have no indication as to how long it should take for them to expand fully.

We checked on their progress about an hour or so later and this was more liking to what I had expected, we
had a slimy bowl of multicoloured marble sized balls in water.  It's impossible to gaze upon them and not plunge your hand into them.  There is something creepy yet utterly satisfying about the slippery slime of the water and these slippery balls.  Granted the little buggers like escaping and they're an arse to pick up off the floor.





Their charm proved irresistible to Thing Two also.  She couldn't stop herself from plunging her hand into them.  In her usual effortless way she encouraged play through asking The Preschooler to find certain colours to make 'potions' as I introduced some measuring cups and the test tubes.

Seeing water slop all over the show I drained the beads so they had the shiny, glistening, oddly textured little balls of delight to play with, without the added mess of water.  This proved equally as satisfying to them and just as beguiling.  I feared they'd have a limited attraction, a mere novelty yet they audibly groaned when I told them it was time to tidy up and the first thing Thing Two requested to play with upon arriving home from school today was the water beads.






They are tempting though.  Just a mere glance of them is teasing to the senses.  I'll admit to having dunked
by hand into them on several occasions today in passing.

I think they'd look stunning over a lightbox in a dark room.  They'd also be more engaging with a longer shallower tub to hold them in.

These are sublime for sensory play and are helpful in teaching colours and the notions of absorbing and expanding. If you haven't tried them already, I highly recommend you give them a go.

Snow fun .

It's not often we do 'Messy Play' for many reasons, most of which include that although I'm an untidy scruffy sod, I don't like actual 'mess' and then  there's the fact the fact that usually I spend longer setting up the activity than The Preschooler actually spends playing with it.  Yet occasionally I'll have one of those masochistic days when life isn't quite shit enough so I'll throw in some mess, or else it will be that god-awful guilt for the poor deprived child who's Mother never really plays anything (and rarely goes out anywhere.

Whilst finally (oh how The Husband rejoiced) sorting through The Craft Cupboard of Doom, dodging things falling on my head and toes and narrowly avoiding a glitter explosion I decided to pack up all the odds and ends of good intentions that never actually happened and donate them to Nursery where they'll actually be used.  Among the debris I found some left over fake snow powder I purchased from the pound shop at Christmas for one doomed project or another.  It's marvellous stuff you get some of the powder, add some water and voila....you have well....snow.  Of a sort.  I'll admit this random genius insanity wasn't entirely born of my own mind, on a Nursery visit, they'd filled a large messy play tray with similar stuff and The Preschooler was itching to investigate.

Seeing as I had nothing remotely appropriate to dispense it into I enrolled the help of a roasting tin, added snow and plonked it on a towel in the lounge seeing as it's considerably warmer than the kitchen and it boasts the comforts of a sofa, laptop and TV for when I'm being boring and not joining in.  The Preschooler looked at me rather suspiciously and I can't honestly say I blame him.  However, curiosity of 'what the hell is mum doing now?' won over Ben 10 as he watched guardedly when I stalked towards his dinosaur and people drawer and dumped that next to him too.  I filled the stunned silence with a brief explanation that I thought the dinosaurs may want to play in the snow.

Oh how they did indeed.  I've not seen The Preschooler so engrossed in something sensory for as long

as I can remember.  Once all the dinosaurs were thoroughly exhausted from fraternising in the snow scene turned into Pontypandy and the adventures of the naughty penguin.  This basically involved a naughty penguin  who insisted on burying all the residents of Pontypandy alive, in the snow, then jumping on their faces for good measure.  That is until the rescue helicopter arrived to attempt a rescue.  Even Bob and friends joined in with a cameo appearance from Dora.

Thing Two was terribly annoyed that when she came home from school, all that was left was a baking tray of slush.

The Preschooler has been begging for more snow ever since yet it was only an appealing purchase in the first place due to the price.  Looks like I'll have to be researching the cost of it in bulk.

It's not often we do this kind of thing yet be it shaving foam play, cloud dough or rainbow price it strikes me that there is something blatantly missing each time that would make these things so much more durable and accessible, especially when Thing Two wants in on the action too and that would be a large messy play tray such as this.  However like most things that would necessitate the expenditure of money, an activity I rather enjoy partaking in however, lack of funds (as always) prohibits this.

The only downside of this little triste with mess was, predictably, the clean up.  When the snow becomes slush, it's near gelatinous and clings to the toys.  They don't just need wiping they need a proper good wash, behind Norman Prices ears and everything.  If you try a simple dunk and dry you'll find a gooey substance clinging to the surface of the water and attempting to devour your hands.

Building blocks of imagination

With the massive array of choice out there for children's toys, all shiny and flashing as they gobble batteries and break silences.  I know they're fun, that the kids love them.  God knows we have a toyshop worth of them conquering the lounge.

I can't help but think though that they remove a large portion of imagination.  They're so obviously something that it's hard to make them into something different.  They're directing play.  They even make the right sounds so you don't have to.  I remember once when I was a child being desperate for a doll that cried etc, when I finally got one I barley played with it.  I hated the very part of it that made me want it.  It took away the spontaneity and the sense of open play.  It devoured the sense of possibilities.

So it's always terribly lovely to see one of The Spawn choosing the basic toys and possibilities over the battery brigade and creating their own little universe with them.

Last Christmas we bought The Toddler some Octons.  Whilst Myself, The Husband and Thing Two thoroughly enjoyed them, The Toddler didn't really show much interest.  Until now.  He has played with them every day for the past week.  It's fascinating observing him.

Take this for example

A flying fire engine speed boat.

How utterly amazing is imagination?  Totally unprompted and unaided.  He saw something in his head and created it with these.

Then out came the old favourite, building blocks.  These have lasted through all three of The Spawn, Thing Two even still uses them now to create epic landscapes and castles.  So what did The Toddler and I do with them that day?

First we made steps, for his beloved wooden people.

Then we made a car park.

The Toddler then redesigned it and commenced building a rescue station

Which evolved into this

We then spent the next half hour having to carry out full on rescue missions as the stairs were on fire, people were stuck down holes and on roofs.  He was the ambulance and fire engine whilst I had to be the rescue helicopter and the police van.  We were the players and the writers of the story as well as providing the scripts and soundtrack.

All this from a pile of bricks and some wooden people/vehicles.

Obviously he adores his all singing all dancing toys too, even if he does add his own touches substituting parts of one with parts of another.  I love that he breaks the rules.  I love that he creates his own.

It's nice to go back to the basics at times though.  What better game to play than one you create yourself in your own universe?

Pavement paint

Having seen the term 'Sidewalk paint' bandied about the internet or a while now, I finally found myself   sinking low enough in sanity to actually make the stuff.

You'll find oodles of recipes online for this stuff that all seem to spin off of the same basic ingredients:

* Cornflour (I used one cup)
* Water (I used one cup)
* food colouring (I had some red, yellow and blue so just made various shades through mixing these)

* Bun tray

Piece of piss, you just add the cornflour and water together, decant into a bun tray then add drops of food colouring to each one.

Voila.  Now stand back and admire all the pretty colours (then grimace at your stained hands if you're even half as cackhanded as me)

Let loose your Spawn.

Pro's:

* It's cheap
* Uses ingredients that most o us have in our store cupboard or else are very easily attainable.
* It's washable, you can hose down the pavement afterwards and it'll all disappear or if you're lazy like me, just wait or it to rain.
* As it's an outdoor activity, your kitchen is saved from desecration.

Cons: 

* Yellow food colouring makes your nails look like you smoke 100 a day.  Grim.
* If you let a 3 year old and a 6 year old play at the same time with it, the three year old will mix all the colours up and the 6 year old will get pissed off at this. doh!

The catastrophic delight of mess.

Whilst attempting to distract Thing Two from The Wobbly Tooth (prior to it's removal) and with Thing One out on a mission with The Husband I swallowed by better judgement and decided to to messy play, for the second day in the row.  My masochism apparently has no limits.

First on todays list was to attempt bubble dough.  Easy peasy two ingredients.  You literally need cornflour and washing up liquid (or any liquid soap will do)  You squirt the soap and add cornflour combining them until you get a dough like substance.  The beauty of it is it looks gooey, only it isn't.  Tremendously strange!  It's squishy yet smooth, stretchy yet easily breaks too.  I can only liken it to bubblegum. However, in typical craft inept style, ours didn't quite appear as it did on the link, it seemed too sticky then too brittle and so we cast it aside with the vague idea of experimenting with different quantities another day.  At least it smells nice.




Feeling a trifle disappointed at that experiment, with two eager beavers expecting something fun, I held my breath and got the paints out, stood aside, thinking of Gin.  Lots of Gin. With Gin on top.

One of the problems with trying to teach The Toddler to use both sides of a sheet of paper is that it's rather difficult to then retract that rule, cue The Toddler trying to paint on both sides of the paper, although we must commend his frugal and earth friendly gesture, I can't say my twitching mentality was awfully thrilled with it.

Finding a momentary lapse in their enthusiasm, I seized the moment and ruthlessly cleared the paints away. I didn't hide the rest of the blank paper, honest.

I can only explain our final messy activity of the day as a momentary lapse in judgement, also known as temporarily being out of my bloody mind. Whatever possessed me, I do not know.

Sensory messy play with shaving foam.  Trying to be lazy and smart at the same time, I sloppily envisaged covering a roasting tray with cling film in order to minimise clean up.  I should have known this would have been utterly and totally futile.  Trust me, you really ought not to bother.  This will be messy.  Accept it.  Take your medication and remember, it will be bedtime soon.

So we filled the roasting tin with shaving foam then sprinkled food colouring onto it and let Thing Two and The Toddler have a jolly good time mixing it all up swirling the colours together through this alien substance they'd not encountered before.

That was just stage one of this stimuli.  I kidnapped some of The Toddlers dinosaurs and much to their astonishment unceremoniously dumped the unsuspecting buggers into the colourful foamy mess. The Spawn stopped, stared and contemplated just how out of my mind I had become and to exactly what depth of crazy I was inhabiting. Can you tell the poor deprived gitlings don't get to partake in spontaneous messy play often?  With trepidation at first they poked at the mess with their hands and seeing that I seem to have momentarily restrained myself and bound my better judgement they dived in with gusto relishing the sensations.  So imagine their delight when I then had the ridiculous idea of filling a bowl with water to allow them to wash the dinosaurs, turning the bowl of water into a sloppy murky foam infested mess that they could then blindly fish around for the dinosaurs only to transfer them back into the foam pit.  Oodles of fun.  It was some new kind of wonderful watching their inhibitions melt away as they became consumed by play.  I even managed not to growl or snarl (too much) when things went incredibly slippy, sploshy and splashy all over the pissing floor. Gah.  I think my palms still bare the crescent marks of my nails.

This is an activity I would definitely never ever even contemplate attempting this with all three spawn. There is simply not enough sedatives in the world to ever enable me to allow that to happen.

I think i'm safe to assume that this was indeed their favourate activity, they even found glee in being asked to take the dinosaurs to the bathroom and give them a rinse whilst I attempted to salvage the kitchen and not for the first time that day pondered taking up smoking again.

All for the bargain price of 59p for the shaving foam.

I knew my sanity was worthless, but 59p? really?

Cloud Dough

Very rarely, I'll get most overcome with that awful mothers guilt thing and randomly decide to do something somewhat different with the little cretins, who usually are bloody good at just playing.  Unlike me, I'm crap at playing (unless it involves dressing up, as an elf. Oh do behave! not in the bedroom) and despite being a domestic slattern of the first degree, I'm actually desperately squiffy at the thought of messy play.

It's even a rare event to get paints out here, they have free access to pens and crayons etc but paint is an entirely different ball game, especially as The Toddler appears to lose interest after five minutes anyway.

So, at some point today I lost the threads of my fraying sanity and decided to make some 'cloud dough', i'm sure if you have a lunchtime fling with Google you'll be inunindated with recipes and ideas for this ...erm...stuff.

It's terribly simple to make, at it's most basic you need two ingredients from your store cupboard, flour and oil (any cooking oil will do, even baby oil)

I used 6 cups of flour and 1 cup of oil.  You simply combine them that really is all there is to it.  I told you it was simple.  I added some yellow food colouring with some perverse nod to to the weather, thinking we'd have our own beach play despite the snow and ice outside.

It will look like a rather lumpy dough, not to worry, this is exactly how it's supposed to look.  No really.  I'm absolutely not shitting you.

However, when you touch it (unfortunately a necessity. Balls.) it has the feel of wet sand, if it wasn't for the fact it gets under my nails and into my jewelry the texture would have been delightfully cathartic to play with)  The Toddler found it fiendishly exquisite or at least he did after I managed to encourage him to not be a wuss like me and do away with the spoon.

With the aid of a pot it was sand castle time!  He remained rather conservative with his efforts at first, yet soon lost all sense of reservation and it was cloud dough everywhere, and I mean everywhere.  This alien creation in our abode was so enticing that even Thing Two begged to play

I was decidedly impressed with the longevity of it's attention holding spell, it was nigh bewitching to them, which almost made it worth while.  Yes, almost   Remember me saying it was messy?  That was a horrific understatement, the bloody stuff gets everywhere.  I even found the wretched stuff on my jeans clad arse.  How? Clothes, floor you name it it had been utterly cloud doughed.  Thing Two tried to escape for a wee, treading it all over the carpet en route.  Argh.  What a catastrophe.  It was even in The Toddlers eyebrows.  So operation clean up involved stripping them both down and me sweeping and wiping whilst it seemed to breed and multiply before my very eyes with The Toddler helpfully singing 'clean up, clean up, everybody clean up!' only everybody wasn't cleaning up, just me. Finally an  impromptu bath, sometimes it really is the easiest option.

Did they love it? absolutely.  Was it easy to make? Ridiculously so.  Cheap? cheap as chips. Would I make it again?  Are you shitting me? Maybe once a year, with them in the nud, outside, at someone elses house.  Possibly.

I think in future a little more planning may be a good idea, perhaps one for summer and the garden.  That's the entirety of my creative maternal inspiration exhausted for another few months now.  Even i'm not masochistic enough to do messy play routinely, afterall that's what The Grandparents and (eventually) Nursery are for, right? 

Splish Splash

Seeing as Thing One is out running errands with The Husband (also known as enforced separation as all Thing One and Thing Two have done today is squabble) I had another of those spontaneous hair brain ideas that never bode well. Obviously I still haven't learned from previous disasters.

This time my idiotic idea was to fill the bath, add washing up liquid for bubbles and loads of bath toys (oddly empty bottles seem to reign as the preferred toys) and voila, an improvised water play area.

The Toddler didn't quite understand that it wasn't actually bath time per se and kept trying to get his leg over the bath side despite me intercepting this on numerous attempts.

I utilised distraction tactics by blowing bubbles yet when I went to put them away Thing Two started throwing handfuls of bath foam all over and The Toddler clambered into the bath.... Yes, complete with trousers and nappy.

Play & Dough.

So due to the despicable weather The Husband finally decided to tackle the jungle of a back garden with the lawnmower, our pensioner of a dog is now rather grateful that he can walk across the garden instead of having to leap and bound over the length of the grass.

Thing Two was absolutely ecstatic that she could go out in the garden again (it's either like a bog out there or a sun trap, neither ideal) and spent literally all her time after school bar coming in for tea out there playing and then we had tears and sulks at bath time because over three hours simply wasn't long enough to play outside and be satisfied.

Even The Dog was in a playful mindset and had a quick game of fetch and pull the rope.

The garden still isn't quite safe completely for The Toddler and due to the disgusting heat, far too hot for him so I got out the play dough I made the other week and he adored it.  Unfortunately he didn't quite agree with the concept of sharing and thus shrieked like a girl every time Thing Two tried to use any of the cookie cutter and the sight of him armed with my rolling pin was actually quite alarming, so we thought it best not to irk him too much, just in case he got violent.

However Thing Two did manage to stay in long enough to have a brief play with the play dough and surprised me by doing this for me.  She really is a little darling, sometimes.   The Toddler came up with some game that required his utmost concentration and kept him occupied for such a long time, he basically had me make small balls and splotches of play dough to which he gathered and planted on his large blob of play dough, The Husband took over when Thing Two bleated about needing me out with her to play football and the like in the garden.

Dying to play

Following on from rainbow rice I had an urge to make some rainbow pasta.  The method is exactly the same.  I didn't bung it in the oven this time however, as last time I attempted it with the rice, the pasta burned. 

Unfortunately despite doing exactly the same for all colours, only one batch actually turned out okay.  I haven't the foggiest as to what on earth went wrong and despite two days in the sun, many of them aren't even dry.

Regardless, The Toddler and I sat on the floor and threaded them onto pipe cleaners, I chose pipe cleaners as they're more substantial for little hands to hold and thread then wool or string and they're fun to bend.

In hindsight if I were to repeat this I'd a) try and work out what went wrong so we have more colours and b) look for a slightly larger pasta tube to make it a tad easier for tiddly hands.

Easy Peasy Play Dough

It really is easy peasy and so much nicer then the stuff you buy.  All you need is:

• 1 cup of plain flour
• 1/2 cup salt
• 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar
• 1 tablespoon of oil
• 2 fruit teabags (or food dye)
• 1 cup of hot water

First add your teabags to the cup of boiling water, you'll need to leave for 4-5 minutes to get a rich colour, I'm impatient though so mine only got a pink tinge.  You can use food dye instead (add to the water) however, the teabags smell divine! Also add the tablespoon of oil.  I used vegetable oil, you can use any oil.  Baby oil gives it a nice smell on your hands when you're playing with it.

In a bowl add the dry ingredients together.


Add the coloured water to the dry ingredients and start mixing

 It will be quite sticky and sloppy at first.

Keep mixing and it will firm up, if it doesn't seem to be turning you can add a little more flour until it does.

Play!

 
 
Keep in a self-seal bag or airtight container and it lasts for quite a long time.  If the air gets to it and it feels a little crunchy just soften it in your hands with some more oil.