Homemade Play-Doh

We made homemade play-doh the other day. It was a lot of fun for the kids to help make, and then to play with. And it was really easy too. We did 4 different colors, aren't they pretty?

Every activity we do lately seems to hold Jacob and Sabine's interest equally. Even though they're almost 5 years apart, their interests are remarkably similar.

Here's the recipe we used:
In one bowl mix:
1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup salt
1 T. cream of tartar

In second bowl mix:
1 1/2 cups water
3 T. vegetable oil
food coloring

Combine both mixtures and heat on stove (low heat) until it reaches the consistency of thickened mashed potatoes.

I don't usually keep white flour in the house, and something told me my wheat flour just wouldn't make the right consistency so I bought a package of white flour, and I'd also recommend getting some kind of cheap oil. I forgot to do this and it was painful to watch my organic canola oil go into batch after batch (because we repeated the activity in Playschool the next day) of play-doh.

It actually only took a few minutes to cook the doh, and I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to tell when it was done, but that wasn't a problem, it started to look like store-bought and I knew that was it. I used a double-boiler to heat the mixture just to be on the safe side because I tend to burn things.