How to Make Your Own Homemade Play Dough

If you are a parent you know that keeping up with your child's play dough habit can be hard. You buy them a wide range of colors of the dough so that they can create many masterpieces. After you break the seals you will see that they love to mix the colors together until they have a brown uniform color. Instead of telling your kids that they can only play with one color at a time you can make some custom play dough with them in one afternoon. Once you learn how to make the stuff you can stop running to the store when they cannot separate the colors anymore. Here's an easy way to make it all you will need are a few things before you can get started: Aprons, a large bowl, a measuring cup, a tablespoon, containers for the dough to be stored in, flour, salt , cream of tarter, vegetable oil and food coloring. Once you have everything set up you will want to follow the directions below.

Take eight cups of flour, three cups of salt, three tablespoons cream of tarter and mix in a large bowl. Then take one fourth of a cup of vegetable oil, four cups of warm tap water and add to the dry mixture. Separate the dough into several smaller balls, small enough to store in your plastic containers. Then you can add as much food coloring as you want to the dough until you are satisfied with the color.

If you know what kind of colors you want you can try different combinations of dye drops for the color turquoise you will need to drop in four blue and one green. If you want brown you can put in five drops of red dye, six drops of yellow and three drops of green. If you rather have the color purple just put in one drop of red and one drop of blue. If greens more your thing you can add different amounts of yellow drops to lighten the hue. If you want more of a lime green you will need to add three yellow drops for every green drop, if you want a darker green you can go for a pistachio by adding only one yellow for every four green. If you want your dough to be orange you just need to add two red drops and three yellow. If you rather have a lighter color like a peach just add one red for every two yellow drops. If you want the dough to be a deeper salmon color just add three red for every two yellow drops.

You can store the finished product in zip locked bags as well. If your dough starts to dry out just add a little more water. If you are looking for toys to act as accessories to your child's new favorite toy look around the kitchen for cookie cutters, plastic utensils and clean shells and pastas. If you can, dedicate a drawer for your child's play dough toys so they can help you by putting them away when they are done playing. For easier clean up just pull out a roll of press and seal wrap, a cutting board or a plastic tablecloth. Making your own play dough can be fun, easy and affordable!