Weekend Crafting

For the past three days Conman has been bugging me to make baking clay. I'm not even sure where he got the idea for that, because I have never made baking clay!

I do have a handy book titled The Stuff That Fun Is Made of: A Comprehensive Collection of Recipes for Play & Learning by Selena Laporte. I purchased this at a homeschool convention I attended last July, and hadn't used it yet. So out it came and we found a recipe for basic modeling dough:

• 5 cups of flour
• 1 cup of salt (yes, you read that right-1 cup!)
• 1/2 cup of vegetable oil
• 2 cups of hot water

We mixed it all together, kneaded it really well and the boys dove in! You can add food coloring if you want to seperate out some dough and then color it. I chose to avoid that and have the boys paint their creations after they had baked and cooled.

This was actually a two day process. Yesterday they crafted and baked; today we painted. We baked them at 200 degrees and it took several hours for Blakester's pieces since they were larger than Conman's. After painting them, I sealed them with clear nail polish. This is a suggestion from the book's author for sealing smaller pieces.

Here's some pics of them working diligently modeling their clay and painting it:

Conman made what he calls "lego guys". You can tell from my previous posts he has a huge fascination with these. Blakester made a snake and a replica of Conman's head:

Ah, brotherly love! At least they worked quietly together during the process.