Getting Crafty

Last Monday was a cooler, rainy day. Luke and I desperately needed a new form of 'indoor entertainment'. The kitchen was already a mess and cleaning it was already on my To-Do list during Luke's nap time so we simply added to the mess, you know, for fun! Last year I came across a recipe for making edible play dough. Nothing fancy- just oatmeal, water, and flour- ingredients I have in the pantry at all times. Luke loves "helping" me bake/cook so he had a great time mixing up all the ingredients.

Once everything was well mixed we had fun shaping the dough into balls, snakes, pancakes, etc. Luke really got into beating the mass of dough with his spoon - getting out his pent up aggressions perhaps?
Once Luke lost interest in the dough and had moved on to some other toy, I got creative and shaped a few airplanes (Luke's latest obsession) and beads (I figured they'd be good for working on hand-eye coordination). The cool thing about this play dough is that you can bake it, so we baked our planes and beads for about 3 hours at 225 degrees, making them rock solid and paintable.

A few days later Luke had a blast painting his new "toys". Thankfully we have non-toxic, washable paint because it was everywhere once Luke was done being artistic. If I had thought ahead I would have had him paint them outside since it was a nice outside and would have made the clean up much easier. Oh well.

Carefully studying his painted bead

This picture is terrible quality, sorry. You can still see Luke is looking strangely like the Joker from Batman with the lovely paint marks around his mouth. Yes, he thought it was more fun to paint his mouth after awhile. Thus, the lack of a paint brush in this picture- the brushes were taken away by mean ol' mom. But that didn't stop the fun, oh no. Luke simply rolled the beads around in the paint using his hands. Creating quite the mess but having a marvelous time!

The finished product!

Please don't judge my terrible painting skills when it comes to the airplane. We'd already had one airplane crash land into a pile of crumbs on the kitchen floor so I wasn't going to try extra hard to make this one look nice, knowing it is just a matter of time before it's in the trash. :) But I'm ok with it! I got three crafty activities that Luke loved out of this, plus painted 'toys' for him to continue to play with... all for very, very cheap. I'm definitely not complaining!