How to Make Playdough

Playdough has been around for years and kids love to play with it and make a variety of items out of the colorful mixture. The great things about playdough are that you can drop it, cut it and twist it without damaging anything. If you're like me you tell your child to put their playdough up when their done playing or it will dry up and get hard. I've got tired of buying playdough so I thought a cool thing would be is to let your child make their own playdough.

The main ingredients you need to make playdough are:
2-3 cups of flour
2-3 cups of warm water
½-1 cup of salt
3 tablespoons vegetable oil

Mixing bowl and a good stirring stick

Also you will need food coloring either in liquid or powder to give your playdough a color that your child will love. As you can see the ingredients are very basic and can be purchased at any grocery store fairly cheap. I recommend having a pair of plastic gloves as well because once you start messing with food coloring it can become messy.

After you have assembled all the ingredients for making playdough you will need to mix all the playdough ingredients together and to stir the mix over low heat on your oven. As you stir up the playdough mix it should thicken up. Once it's thick allow it to cool before handling the playdough. Also, once you touch the playdough mix and its sticky you'll need to keep cooking it until it becomes less sticky and feels more like real playdough. If it remains sticky upon touching the playdough mix just keep cooking and stirring up the mix on your oven. You may have to add a ½ cup of water each time you keep cooking the mix.

Once you get the playdough mix from being sticky you need to take the mix and put it on a clean counter and start working the playdough mix making sure its all mixed up and ready for making playdough.

Now you're ready to take the playdough mix and make separate balls out of them so they can be colored. In this step you need to poke your finger halfway to the middle of the playdough balls. Once you've done this take the food coloring you decided to use and put in the hole you just made in the playdough. After this is done, fold the playdough over the hole and start working the ball with your hands until the dye is worked in throughout the whole ball of playdough.

Work the dye through the playdough and you can add more food color as necessary to achieve your chosen color. Once you're done with your playdough your kids will have fun and the best thing is that the playdough is safe even if they decide to eat it. Store it in a sealed container to keep the flexibility of the playdough and if it dries just add some water and rework the dough.