What a treat! The ever creative Jill from Homemade by Jill is sharing her homemade play-dough recipe and tutorial.
Jill writes...
Homemade playdough is a great summer craft! It is easy enough for kids to help with, only takes about 10-15 minutes, and gives you comparable results to store-bought playdough. And the best part is ... you probably have all the necessary materials on hand in your pantry.
Ingredients needed:
- 1 cup flour
- 1 cup warm water
- 2 teaspoons cream of tarter
- 1 teaspoon oil
- 1/4 cup salt
- food coloring
When in this process you allow your kids to assist is entirely up to you. Younger children can mix dry ingredients, older kids can stir (supervised) at the stove top, and adding food coloring is fun for everyone. My son is under two, so he mainly helps me with the "playing" part. Please supervise your children and use caution with the stove and hot dough.
- Combine all ingredients (except food coloring) in a medium-sized saucepan.
- Stir over medium heat until smooth.
- Stir continuously until the dough balls (about 1-2 minutes). Remove from heat.
- When dough is cool enough to handle, knead until smooth.
- Form into a ball.
- Divide into as many colors as you'd like to make. A single batch makes a good amount for four colors.
- Add food coloring to the divided dough. Gel food coloring works quite well. I have not tried liquid food coloring.
- Knead the food coloring into the dough. To protect your counter top, knead over wax paper. To protect your hands, wear plastic or rubber gloves, if you have them (you could also put the dough and food coloring inside a ziplock bag and have the kids squish it around inside).
- When the dough is a consistent color, ball and set aside.
- Repeat with the rest of your colors.
- Put the dough in separate containers. Toddler-sized snack containers are a good size, and I have also wrapped the colors individually in wax paper and stored in zip-lock baggies.
- Store in an airtight container until ready to use. It will stay soft for several weeks if stored airtight.
Hmm ... I feel like I'm forgetting the most important step. Oh, that's right - PLAY!
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I love homemade playdough. So fun!
LOVE IT! I’ve always wanted to try this but never have! Thx to YOU, now’s the time! Super Sophie will be giddy happy! xoxo
We love making this! To knead the dough and easily mix in the colors I put it in my Bosch (could also use your Kitchen Aid) with the dough hooks and let it do all the work.
I love making play dough! I usually add a packet of unsweetened kook-aid while mixing. It adds great color and smell with a little less mess than food coloring. Have you tried edible playdough? You can google it for the recipe. I think it’s made with peanut butter. I haven’t tried it but it sounds fun.
hi there, what a great idea!
but I don’t know what “cream of tarter” is? I couldnt find it on the translator site, so is there an other word for it?
Greetings from switzerland!
Ahuefa
Thanks for posting this. The kids were playing with play dough yesterday, but it’s getting a bit old and dried out. Now I don’t have to go digging for a recipe, it’s right here!!!
Thanks!!
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Thank you for this recipe!!
I’ll try with my nephews!! I think they’ll love it!!!
Have a nice day!
I’m thinking about making this. I’ve made it before and it comes out great.
Note: If you ever come across a recipe that requires you NOT to cook it…do NOT make it. I keep ours in a ziploc bag and it went bad. It smelled awful and it got really liquidy. Gross!
I have never used liquid either, but I do have some. I even bought the neon colors ones lol!! Hopefully it works well. i know the gel gives a bolder color.
This is a great recipe! I’ve usually used the liquid colors and they work fine, but I think the gels seem more vivid. I’m going to try a batch with that this week! Another one of our favorite things to do with play dough is to hide objects in it and they look for them, adds a little more fine motor work.
Just poppin’ in to say Thanks for being a Top Referrer for May on Hoosier Homemade!
Thanks much!
~Liz
My grandma used to make this and she’d wrap it in plastic wrap and freeze it for a long time. If it started to dry out, she’d just had a few drops of water. Great stuff! And because it wasn’t toxic or anything, we’d use cookie cutters while we were playing with it without fear of ruining the cutters for future food use.
Another great way to dye the playdough is to use KoolAid packets. The kind that requires you to add your own sugar. The colors won’t be as vibrant but it makes it smell great!
great pictures! i love this. i was going to do playdough tutorial too!!
btw, i grabbed your button for my blog!!
Ahuefa, cream of tartar is a cooking ingredient that stabilizes eggs and provides acidity to recipes. It can be found in baking aisles where gelatin or agar agar is found. If you have trouble finding it in switzerland, here is a substitution guide: http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/Dictionary/C/Cream-of-Tartar-5100.aspx.
If you want scented playdough, you can add a package of Kool-Aid when you are cooking it on the stove and then you don’t have to add coloring later either. Plus your kids will love smelling it!
a Kool-aid envelope (the kind you add sugar to) are great to use instead of dye and gives the playdough a great smell too
This is my favorite play-dough recipe! I love how bright the colors are and how long it stays pliable… or playable.
I made some in the Fall for our co-op pre-school and it’s still good.
This looks great, but could you tell me how it would turn out without cream of tartar? I’ve been living in Peru for 2 1/2 years, and I still can’t find it.
@ Ahuefa
in Dutch it is called “wijnsteenpoeder”, perhaps that’s easyer to translate.
Toffe kleuren zeg!
oops, that was Dutch for “cool colors!”
@ Ahuefa
and in German its Weinstein(back)pulver.
However, I can’t find it at any store here.
Anybody knows if it can be replaced by backing soda/backing powder??
Would really love to make this awesome playdough for my little boy.
Waving from Germany,
Jule
I am looking at the substitutions for cream of tartar, and the options are vinegar or baking powder. Anyone try using one of these? In Peru there are a lot of things I can’t get, so we do lots of substitutions.
I made the non-cook version and I thought it was good (I chose it because I told my son I’d make him some playdough, and I was too impatient to do the cooked version because I thought it would take too long to cool), but then when I did the cooked version, the product was VASTLY superior, and it didn’t even take that long to cool.
Love homemade playdough.
[...] Homemade Playdough Recipe | Skip To My Lou [...]
Hi, I made the cooked playdough recipe with liquid colours (pink, blue, green, fire engine red) this afternoon with my 4 year old. He loved squishing in the colours in the ziplock bag (great suggestion!).
It turned out just as beautifully as the pictures by Jill. Thank you so much. I am going to make play dough as party treats for the kids for his 5th birthday next month! Great website Skip to my Lou! thank you xox
[...] week we made playdough with the kids, and they are loving it! The recipe I used was really simple, cheap, fast, and the consistency is identical to storebought playdough. [...]
Wow I didnt know you could do that. This is perfect as my son keeps eating the playdough.
You can also add a drop of food extract to make it scented. I add a drop or two of vanilla for calming playdough…LOL! Thanks for the recipe Jill. I had lost mine. With kids stuff having so many chemicals in them these days, it is great to have some old fashion recipes for things that you can control. Plus it is a great lesson to teach kids not EVERYTHING comes from the store
We made the playdough Saturday morning….my 7 & 9 year old sons LOVED it! They have gotten it out constantly since. Thanks for the reminder of how fun playdough is!
This is the best homemade recipe for playdough I have ever used. Thanks!
This one from Cooks.com uses alum instead of cream of tartar. I have used this one and it is great! Maybe those of you who can’t find cream of tartar can use this one!!
1 1/2 c. water
1/2 c. salt
2 tbsp. powdered alum
2 tbsp. cooking oil
2 1/2 c. plus 2 tbsp. flour
Food coloring
Mix water, salt and food coloring and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add alum and oil. Pour all at once into flour. Mix and knead with hands. Store in a plastic bag. (If playdough should get hard, add water.)
As a preschool teacher, I make play doh weekly for my class…sometime more often if there is a sneeze in it or such…I prefer the kool aid recipie…and it may work for those who can’t find cream of tartar or alum.
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup salt
2 small packages of kool aid(unsweetened)
2 cups boiling water
3 tbsp oil
mix together the dry ingredients
add the wet ones while boiling
mix with wood spoon, then knead by hand
when COOL store in an air tight container
can be frozen and thawed for later play!
We made it today, and it turned out great! Thanks for the recipe, Jill!
My 20 month-old twins ate some and fed some to the dogs, but we had fun playing with the rest!
As a cake decorator, I always have leftover marshmallow fondant (MMF) that I let my kids play with. MMF is very easy to make with marshmallows, powdered sugar, and shortening. The kids play with it like play dough and it’s completely edible!
This recipe is so EASY and so AWESOME! Thank you for sharing! My 2-yr-old’s in love, ha!!
I made your recipe today and it turned out wonderful! I tossed it in the Kitchen Aid with the dough hook to knead it and my 4 year old added the Kool-Aid for color. Both kids played for 2 hours! It’s great texture and looks pretty and smells nice! I’ve bookmarked it for future use!
Just out of curiosity…has anyone ever let this kind of playdough dry? I’m looking for something that the kids can play with but we can have the option of letting it dry into whatever they make. Do you think this will dry like salt dough?
Way cool – I made this today with the Kool-aid, but I had to add more color because I wanted it vibrant. My kids thought it was the coolest thing and kept saying over and over – mom made this. Like it was a novelty. I have used the alum recipe before and it is very similar in texture. Thanks again for this wonderful recipe and the pictures demonstrating it. I thought I had done it wrong at first when it was really lump and not the consistancy of dough. But once it got thicker it was perfect after a couple of good kneadings.
I made this today with the kids I baby sit (7, 5, 3, and 2). For some reason my gel colors really didn’t work well. We had to add quite a bit to make them look vibrant. I ended up sending some of them home quite pale and told them to add regular food coloring. They had a blast doing it and learned a little bit about measuring! The best consistency of home made play doh I’ve ever come across. If I can ever find a smell they all agree on, maybe we will try that.
[...] We still have time to make amazing things out of homemade playdough [...]
[...] via skiptomylou.org [...]
i made this with gluten free flour and we love it. the only problem is our’s gets a little gooey/sticky on the kids fingers. do you think i should add more flour?? i also used some natural food coloring from “india tree” brand that worked well. pastel colors. thanks i have added this post to my favorites!
My 4 year old and I just made a batch of this…the only thing is, it doesn’t look dry like yours does. It got thick and doughy but never formed a ball and I have it sitting here cooling on the counter but it still looks really sticky and stringy! What did I do wrong?!
awesome idea…tkx a lot!
[...] (Recipe and photos from the incredible Skip To My Lou. [...]