Rainbow Play dough

I have only made home made play dough a few times in my life.  My mother always made it growing up, but I found for me and my kids the store bought play dough was just fine.  Then I was thinking how fun it would be for the kids to learn about mixing colors with play dough after seeing a recipe for bis-quick microwave play dough.  I really don't like cooking so when I saw something done in the microwave I thought I should give it a try.  Well, for me it was a disaster! (many things done in the kitchen are for me)  I must have followed the directions wrong.  I made the recipe three times for three different colors.  One color was way too sticky (probably needed more time cooking), one color was way too dry, and the other color wouldn't come together.  All of them were very very lumpy too.  I then found my recipe for doing play dough on the stove top.  I have to say doing it on the stove top was a lot better.  It was way faster and came out perfectly.  I spent over a half hour doing three batches of microwave play dough and probably 10 minutes on the stove top recipe (minus the two trips to the store for items in the recipe I was short on!)  

Here is the recipe I used: 

2.5 cups of water

1 1/4 cup of salt

1 1/2 Tbs. cream of tartar

5 Tbs vegetable oil

2 1/2 cups flour

mix all the ingredients together in a large sauce pan with a few drops of food coloring and cook on medium high stirring the entire time until it gets to a good un-gooey consistency.  I made mine without the food coloring so we could experiment with colors afterwards.  As it gets to a good consistency take it out of the pan and kneed with your hands until it is nice and smooth throughout.  

I then separated mine into three equal sections and mixed one red, one yellow, and one blue with food coloring.  (WARNING: you will get your hands died doing it this way!) 

We then read the book Mouse Paint.  This has been a favorite of ours for a long time.  

After reading the book I asked James if he thought we could make different colors using just red, yellow, and blue.  He was really cute.  He grabbed the book and said, "Yes!  We just have to follow the instructions."  So we followed with the book one more time and made a rainbow of colors.  

If I was to do this over again, I would make the ball of the original color larger than the ones we mixed with because we ended up with less red, blue and yellow 

Then I let the kids at it to create however they thought would be fun.  

I helped Grace roll and make a pretty rainbow with all our mixed colors

she preferred taking all the colors and making a mess out of them

James made a spaceship

After we were finished I put all the balls into a Tupperware and stored it in the fridge to use again another day!

The brown was all the colors that got mixed together that I couldn't rescue back to its original color.

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