Fun with dough!

Since I didn't keep up with the blog very well during the holiday break (Daddy was home -mostly- for 2.5 weeks!) I will be posting the highlights of our holiday time in the next few posts...

I have fun childhood memories of playing with warm homemade play-dough that my mom made for us sometimes on rainy days. I have been wanting to make some with my kiddos for some time now and finally did. They loved it!

We just used whatever random tools we could find among their kitchen toys to make fun designs and we also used the Christmas cookie cutters to make ornament shapes.

Then we took it a step further and baked them in the oven for little miss to paint.
She had fun designing her own creations.

This one she came up with on her own, by putting two sleds together and two reindeer together to make "Santa's Sleigh" with presents she created from the play-dough scraps.
We certainly won't be hanging this one from the tree... I am actually not sure what we are going to do with it yet? It's already broken a few times.

In case you are interested, below is the recipe I found in a teacher magazine at the library. When you are ready to knead the dough, make you have plenty of extra flour on hand for your fingers and the dough to keep everything from sticking... I just used yellow food coloring because we wanted to make ornaments to paint. Next time Little miss asked if we could make it pink of course. A friend told me they added glitter to their playdough to make it sparkly fun for her daughter's birthday party. What a fun idea!

After we (little miss did most of them) made all the shapes and designs, we put them in the oven on 300 degrees to bake for one hour. They turned out great! However, the thin ones are very fragile- oops!

Cooked Play Dough

1 cup flour

½ cup salt

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 cup water

1 tsp oil

Food coloring

Mix dry ingredients.

Stir in the water, oil, and food coloring.

Place the mixture in a heavy pan and cook over medium heat for 2-3 minutes.

After cooking, knead dough until it is soft and smooth.

Store in an airtight container.