homemade playdough and j-e-l-l-o

Last week during the pre-valentine, stuck in the house, snow days...I was just trying to think of some fun activities for Kinley and I to do that were not just sitting around bored of the same old toys and stuck watching TV. So, my first thought was homemade playdough! It sounded so great. So, I found a recipe for "Nature's Playdough" online. (There are SO many playdough recipes out there but, I thought with this one I might have everything I needed in my pantry without having to leave the house!)

Nature's Playdough

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1 cup water

2 tablespoons oil

2 tablespoons cream of tartar

beet, spinach, and carrot juice

Mix flour, salt and oil, and slowly add the water. Cook over medium heat, stirring until dough becomes stiff. Turn out onto wax paper and let cool. Knead the playdough with your hands until of proper consistency. Use as is, or divide into balls and add a few drops of the vegetable juices to make green, pink, and orange.

Well, I quickly nixed the tartar, beet, spinach and carrot juice idea and went straight for the non-natural purple food coloring. Then, I noticed I was running out of salt...so, I substituted about half the salt with Lawry's seasoned salt. The color turned out terrible because my playdough hardened much too quickly for the food coloring to set in. But, the most noticeable characteristic of this playdough was how terribly your hands smelled like Lawry's as soon as you touched it. Pretty much made me gag. So, in retrospect, I definitely recommend the playdough recipe...just NOT the Lawry's as a substitute. Kinley was not a hug fan either...she tried to use some cookie cutters on it...but, was not impressed for very long.

So, to redeem myself...I decided to make some Jello jigglers! Who doesn't LOVE those!?! I thought about cute little heart jello jigglers for Kinley's class would be cute! So, we started in on those. However, very quickly I learned this idea would 1) be a HUGE hit with Kinley and 2) NEVER actually be made into Jello jigglers. The pics are pretty cute though :-)