Yesterday I talked about the treasure hunt we had at the kids’ combo birthday party this year. The treasure (aka pot of gold at the end of the rainbow) was rainbow play doh. I’ve got be the THE LAST person in blog world to blog about kool aid play doh. It’s just that awesome and it just took me this long to make any, much less blog about it. Kool aid play doh smells like starburst candy and looks awesome and is non toxic. And… I feel justified in blogging about it because I took it to a new level. That’s right I spent hours making 6 huge batches of it and making it into RAINBOW PLAY DOH! I’m not gonna lie… It kind of felt like I was playing with play doh the whole time so it was ok that it took hours.
It was a winner with the kids. What kid doesn’t want to mix all the play doh colors together? And if they don’t, they can segment out each color. This would also be awesome for teaching colors or primary and secondary colors. Or it would be good for a beach theme or craft theme party as they ended up looking a lot like beach balls.
At any rate, here’s how I made them. I followed this recipe and made one batch for each color…
Rainbow Play doh
Recipe2 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 Tbsp cream of tarter
2 pkgs unsweetened kool aid
2 cups boiling water
3 tbsp vegetable oil
Mix first 4 ingredients together. Add boiling water and oil. Stir until it cools enough to handle. Knead dough with hands. You can add a little flour if too sticky… a little water if way too dry… but you shouldn’t need to.
A note on colors… My purple came out wonky because I accidentally got 1 grape and 1 berry kool aid mix. I bet 2 grape ones would make a beautiful purple though. And, lemonade did not make yellow at all. But some yellow food coloring I had worked great. So the lemonade was only useful for the smell.
As soon as a batch cooled enough I split it into 3 balls and put it in a plastic bag while I worked on the other batches.
To make the rainbow ball here’s what I did. I took one of the red balls and cut it into 6ths. Then I put each 6th/slice aside. Then I got out a ball of orange and cut it in 6ths and put each orange slice up against a red slice. Repeat this with each color. The way I got an even 6th is below.
Start with your ball. (You can see I did the red, orange, and yellow slices for these already and put them together.)
Cut the ball in half with a clay tool. A butter knife would probably work fine. Then I reshaped the half circle a little.
Score the ball on the flat side of the… semi-sphere? Semi-circle 3d?
Turn it over and use the score mark as a guide to make cut the semi-sphere into 3rds.
Keep stacking the slices together till you have one of each color then reshape the ball a little and store it in a plastic bag.
Oh, and then repeat 18 times if you have 18 kids coming to the party!
And have starburst to eat because you are sure going to want some after smelling these for a really long time!
Now I have all kinds of ideas for play doh creations. Maybe I’ll twist red and white snakes together for Christmas candy canes… Oh the possibilities!
There are so many great play dough recipes out there to try. It amazes me more parents don’t play with it.