Kai Project: A Jello Play Dough Assembly Line

Kai's going to school some days now, so today was our first day together since Christmas break. Her first request? Jello play dough. We have an assembly line process to make five colors of play dough. 

We only use about a third of a box of jello, the rest goes into salt shakers we use for other projects (jello is a fun powdered paint or food coloring for just about anything, and I love the way it smells). First we mix the ingrediants in a pan:

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup flour

1/3 package jello

1 T oil

1 T salt

1 T cream of tartar

It looks like this:

Kai watches me cook the first batch, but while I'm cooking later batches, she works on the previous color. Stirring over medium heat, the mixture will turn into a ball like this:

I find this part really odd. If the heat is too high, you may get clumps. You can either stir faster or turn the heat down and stir until smooth. It will still turn into a ball in your pot. I turn out the ball into a bowl with about 1/2 cup of flour:

While this is cooling, I wash the pot and Kai prepares the ingredient for the next batch. She is able to pick the next color and open the package of jello. I help measure the rest into the pot for her to mix. While I cook the next batch on the stove, she kneads the flour into the ball. Or rather, she "folds it in half, smushed it flat, and sprinkles flour on top" as I repeat these instructions... But she's learning. 

And the end result?

Five balls of delicious smelling play dough and one flour covered munchkin making crazy faces at me. 

Kai Projects: Fun with Jello

After my success with Kool-Aid, I decided to see what we could do with jello. I got some cheap salt shakers at Target and filled them with jello. The first day, we used the part of the jello packet that didn't fit in the salt shakers to make jello play dough. So far, this is my favorite of the jello projects.

This was the recipe I found on Pinterest:

1 cup flour
1 cup water
2 T salt
2 T cream of tartar
2 T oil
1 box jello

Mix together and cook on the stove over low/medium heat until a ball forms. Knead in extra flour until no longer sticky.

Because I only had partial boxes of jello, I made several smaller batches. This also gave us a variety of colors. I basically quartered the recipe and made five batches. In this picture you can see the three finished balls of play dough, the blue play dough cooling before we kneaded in extra flour, and Kai mixing the last batch of yellow play dough before I put it on the stove. You can also see my filled salt shakers behind a flour covered Kai:

This stuff is amazing - by far the best play dough we've made at home. It has a very nice texture and it smells lovely, not at all like the commercial stuff. Kai has played with it several times now (it is starting to get a bit mixed together, but it has maintained its other qualities):

This morning we tried our usual shaving cream paint with the jello. I don't think the colors are quite as bright as I would like. I used our sidewalk chalk method, mixing the jello with water before adding the shaving cream. I think this might work better if I skipped the water.

The other thing we did with jello was make "glue play dough" or gak / flubber. We've done this before with food coloring, but I thought it would be interesting to try with jello. Again we used our five colors:

For some reason, the yellow didn't set up properly (I wonder if it is because we used more yellow jello due to the lighter color and this interfered with the glue/borax reaction) and I ended up throwing it out. Kai began mixing this immediately:

When I pulled it out of the fridge this morning, the mixture was complete - it's purple with a few green and red highlights:

The consistency was odd this morning, though. I've left it out at room temperature to see if it will improve. This may be one project that needs to have food coloring.