Wednesday, March 19, 2014

DIY Sparkle Dough {Tutorial}



A few weeks ago I shared with you my daughters 4 year old Rainbow Birthday Party. Because her party was rainbow themed I thought the perfect party favours would be some balls of sparkly playdough in a bunch of rainbow colours! She was very excited about the idea and was even more thrilled when she realized how much she would be able to participate in the making of it.

This dough is incredibly simple to make and another great thing about it is, if one of your kiddos gets into a 'hungry' mood while playing with it, it is completely 100% edible (if you forgo the glitter). Every ingredient used to make it, you can find in your pantry. I'm not saying it's going to taste very good (because it's not), but at least you know your child isn't ingesting any weird preservatives or any dangerous ingredients for that matter. :)


Can't Get Started Without:
~4 c. all purpose flour
~1 c. iodized table salt
~1/2 c. cream of tartar
~1/4 c. oil (I used canola oil)
~4 c. water
~gel food colouring (I find it easier to work with than the liquid stuff)
~coloured glitter 
*the coloured glitter makes this recipe un-edible, if you skip this step, the dough is 100% safe to ingest*
1. In a large pot, whisk together the flour, salt and cream of tartar. Then add your water and oil. 

2. Keep whisking everything until your mixture is smooth and fairly lump free. If there are a few odd lumps, don't fret, they will disappear as your mixture begins to cook.

3.Turn your burner to medium heat and begin to cook your mixture. Stir continually. (I would recommend using a wooden spoon if you have one as it won't stick to your dough the way plastic or metal will). Your mixture will begin to thicken and look quite lumpy, don't worry though, just keep on stirring and everything will turn out perfectly. :)
4. Your mixture will eventually become quite thick and will look like very soft dough. You can now remove your pot from the heat. Stir the dough a bit more once it's removed from the heat and you will notice that there are no more lumps remaining. Wahoo!


Next scoop your dough out of the pot and onto a cutting mat or placemat. The dough will be quite warm, but you should still be able to handle it. Start to knead your dough. It's actually really nice to play with at this point because it is so warm and soft. The oil in the dough also prevents it from sticking to your hands.


Because I wanted to make multiple colours of dough, I seperated my dough into 6 evenly sized balls.

Once they were seperated, it was time to colour them. I just flattened out each ball and put in a bit of gel food colouring. Then I just kneaded the dough a bit more until the colour was fully dispersed throughout each ball of dough. I was really impressed with how efficiently the colour mixed into the dough. The more I kneaded the more food colouring came off of my hand and ended up in the dough.



If you choose to forgo the glitter, you could just stop here and you would have some awesome coloured dough to play with. Or, if you want your dough to sparkle, let's move on...


To make your dough sparkly all you have to do is add glitter. I happened to have bought a pack of different coloured glitters at Michael's a while ago with no real project in mind for them. They worked perfectly for this project however, because I had a different glitter to match each colour of dough. To each ball of dough I added about a tsp. of coloured glitter. 


Then all I did was knead my dough again and the sprinkles worked there way into it, in effect creating.... Sparkle Dough! It is so pretty. :)




The next few steps I took are completely optional as they were done only to create favour bags for the party. If you are making the dough solely for yourself then you are done! Good job, now go and get creative. :)

If you've chosen to create favour bags as well, then here are the next few things I did. 

First I figured out how many kids I needed to make favour bags for and then seperated the big ball of dough into smaller pieces. They weren't perfectly even, but whose paying that close of attention. ;) Then once I had all the pieces of dough I needed, I rolled each piece into little balls. 



This is where Jaydn came in very helpful as that was a lot of little balls to roll!!


Once we had all of our little balls rolled out, we stuffed little sandwich sized zip bags with ball of each colour into them.


Then I used an image I found and enhanced on pic monkey and print and cut it on my Silhouette Cameo. I attached it to the sandwich bags filled with Sparkle Dough and voila! perfect party favours. :)


Ingredients:
~4 c. all purpose flour
~1 c. iodized table salt
~1/2 c. cream of tartar
~1/4 c. oil (I used canola oil)
~4 c. water
~gel food colouring 
~coloured glitter 

Directions:
1. Stir all ingredients together in a large pot.
2. Cook at medium heat while stirring continuously, until mixture thickens into a dough.
3. Remove dough from heat and place onto a cutting mat.
4. Knead dough  until desired consistency.
5. Separate dough and add food colouring and coloured glitter as desired.



Have you ever made homemade play dough? What other fun projects do you like to do with your kiddos?


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