I've got a bit bored with the playdough colours that we get using the food colouring available at the supermarket, so I've been experimenting a bit over the last couple of weeks.
The children spotted blackberries on the way back from school the other day and had great fun picking them. As they were on a busy main road, I wasn't keen for the children to eat them but inspired by
this post at Minieco I thought I could use them to dye the playdough.
I boiled them up in some water, squeezed them through a strainer and then used the water to make playdough.
The blackberries made a lovely vibrant pink colour, that I had never achieved before with the supermarket food colouring (photo doesn't really depict the colour)
I then tried beetroot, boiling it up in the same way and got a very similiar pink colour. I think I may have got a deeper colour if I'd boiled the beetroot for a bit longer, but I was too impatient to see the colour it would create:) Ok, so I'd made a lovely pink, but I wanted other vibrant colours. It then occured to me that maybe the colours used in cake decorating would create better result. So I got both powdered and liquid colouring from a local cake making shop and experimented.
I was very impressed with the results - again the photo doesn't really depict the colours (the playdough coloured with beetroot is in the bottom right corner).
Although these were quite expensive, approx £3 for a little bottle or pot, in the long run they would work out much cheaper as I needed very little to create deep vibrant colours. I literally dipped the wrong end of a spoon into the pot and this was all I needed to create these colours. The liquid form worked much better than the powder and there were lots and lots of colour shades to choose from.
I found the food colouring worked equally well on rice!
I going to try pasta next! (a tip for dying pasta - put a few drops of hand sanitising gel into the bag when colouring. The alcohol in it seems to break down the surface of the pasta, allowing the colour to be absorbed).
During my experimenting I ran out of cream of tartar. I had always believed cream of tartar acted as a preservative in play dough, so thought I would get away with using less as I didn't particularly need the playdough to last for long. However I discovered that this isn't its only function! It also prevents the dough becoming too sticky. If you scrimp on the cream of tartar, you end up with playdough that is constantly sticky, no matter how much flour you add to the mix!
Other tips:
The more salt you add the stiffer the dough - great if you want a dough that holds its shape once manipulated.
Adding glycerine gives the dough a lovely sheen!
When making dough, mix the ingredients thoroughly to get rid of as many lumps as possible before cooking (alternatively put through a strainer) as this seems to make a much softer dough.
