Homemade playdough

Some friends were talking about plasteline and whether our little ones are already interested in using it. I actually hadn't yet tried it with Adelaide (or any sort of playdough).

I wanted to try a self-made playdough (I don't really like the texture of the shop Playdoh and I don't know, is there anything better out there. Usual old style plasteline would be nice, perhaps, but maybe not this early, I wouldn't like her tasting it..), I got a recipe from a friend, that goes like this - 12 tablespoons of flour, 12 teaspoons of salt, 2 tablespoons of oil and add water until consistency is right (I needed less than half a cup). Theoretically this is eatable (very salty, of course, so not very tasty), you can also add food coloring, which probably would be fun - to have many different colors. I'm not a big fan of food coloring though, at least eating it, and didn't have one at the moment, so I didn't add it.

The recipe is actually similar to the salt dough recipe, that I saw recently and actually was planning to make it for memorabilia hand prints of the children (isn't it a great idea? Instead of buying the expensive and not even that effective shop stuff for making the prints), that one was - 1 cup of flour, half a cup of salt and about half a cup of water. So the only difference is the oil, maybe the oil makes it nicer to work with? But I made it just from this same one now, hopefully works too, you're supposed to just let it stand and dry for a couple of weeks.


But the playdough indeed was nice! The texture was pleasant.. Kinda like the real playdough, I guess (better, in fact). It was nice for rolling out, cutting shapes, even for modelling (I tried to make a cat out of it, Adelaide liked it), making balls and worms and so on and on. All in all, it offered us nice time for a good hour. :) Maybe I enjoyed it more than Adelaide.. :D At least definitely saw it as a possibility.. So I'm thinking - great for older children! But not bad for an (almost) 20-month-old either. :)

I only had one worry about this..
We made it together, so Adelaide saw that flour goes in it and other stuff, she thought we are making an actual dough. She was very interesting in helping me make it, as always, and that's great. But then I started thinking.. I don't want her to think now, that we can play like this with food (other, actual dough sometime), it is a bit confusing. (Maybe the food coloring would have been a good idea then, at least differentiating it somehow?) This time I tried to explain, that this is playing dough, that we don't eat this.. (She tasted it a bit.) But I need to give this aspect a thought and decide, how should we do best..









We made the whiskers from toothpicks, Adelaide later enjoyed putting many, many (all of them..) toothpicks in the dough. I showed her also, how to make little balls and little worms.. This was actually something special for me, because I remember how my Grandmother (who died, when I was 4 years old) showed this to me with clay.. She showed me, that if you roll the clay in your hands one way, you get little balls, but if you do it the other way, you get little worms.. I remember it very clearly, I have many memories with my Grandmother.. So this was special.

Adelaide had to show to her sister too - she says: Look, Jasmiina! (Skaties! Vaata!). We have told her, that Jasmiina is looking at you, watching, what you're doing.. :)



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