T.T.: Natural-Dye Homemade Playdough

Would you believe that in almost twelve years of parenting, I have never once purchased playdough? Kids love it, of course, but most parents do not. Messy, expensive, funky smelling, and inevitably ends up dried out in those little cups, which then get thrown away.

Not into it.

However! At least three of those problems can be avoided by making your own playdough. (Not the messiness. That's just the nature of playdough, purchased or no.)

I had never tried this, but on Jack's birthday this year, I did. Because it was cold, and the kids were bored, and, well, it was Jack's birthday and he wanted to try it.

I used this recipe for the actual dough*, and, to be honest, it is kind of a pain. Mostly because it's pretty hard to stir the ever-thickening dough around in the pot continuously. It's not complicated, though.

But of course, what is playdough without all the colors? And what if you don't have food coloring because the idea of putting it in food is alarming to you and you never buy it?

And by "you," I of course mean "I."

Luckily, I know from my adventures in Easter-egg dying** that it is perfectly possible to create a dye from random things found in the kitchen. Which is why I dyed my playdough with blueberries and coffee.

I didn't really follow directions for this part. All I did was pour boiling water over about six frozen blueberries, then mash the berries and strain the resulting liquid off. And I used my spent coffee ground in the French press to make a some second-run coffee. 

Then I separated some of the thickened white dough into two chunks. I put one chunk back into the cooking pot with the blueberry water, mixed it all together, and cooked it some more until the dough had reached the proper consistency again. This made pink playdough, which made Poppy very happy.

I did the same with the coffee water, although I think I added too much of the water to that color, so it was a little wetter. It never did get drier, even with more cooking and kneading in extra flour. It was still usable though. And that made brown.

Colored playdough! Yay me!

If you want to try this, I would say you only need a few tablespoons of the dyed water for about a cup of the dough.

I thought about making yellow with curry powder, but then I thought how curry powder stains and decided I really didn't want to have my children handling that at all.

The pink blueberry playdough is a little more damp than the white, and the brown coffee was more damp than the pink. But it was all a hit.

Playdough table and chairs made by my dad, table cover courtesy of a really cheap and awful shower curtain liner from a dollar store that I use to cover the kitchen table when the kids paint.

It was a little bit of effort, but now I have three bags of playdough (in quart-size ziptop bags that I wash and re-use) that I did not have to pay for, that do not smell weird, and that did not create any further plastic trash. Hooray.

* Because it was the first one that came up when I searched for a homemade playdough recipe. That's about as much research as I ever put into recipes, to be honest.

** This just reminded me that I should have tried using paprika to make orange. Next time.