There are hundreds of ways to make scented playdough, but I would like to share some of my favourites with you all. Playdough is fun enough as it is but it's even better when you can make playdough cupcakes and playdough bikkies that actually smell like the real deal! Traditional playdough has a pretty funky smell that some people find hard to mask - well here is a list of other ways to make scrumptious smelling playdough that have all been tried and tested by yours truly! :)
Picture
Fruity Scented Playdough (Non-Edible)

You will need:
1 cup plain flour
2 tablespoons oil
200ml water
50ml fruity fragrant shampoo
½ cup salt
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
Food colouring to match your scent (green for apple, red for strawberry, orange/yellow for orange/mango)

How to make it?
  • Pour all dry ingredients, flour, salt and cream of tartar together in a saucepan.
  • Add oil, shampoo, colouring and water to dry ingredients.
  • I use a whisk before heating as I find this helps remove lumps and blends the ingredients well.
  • Cook over medium heat constantly stirring until it becomes a thick blob.
  • Then turn out onto a clean surface and knead into a smooth ball. Be careful the play dough will be very hot!
  • Store in a plastic zip lock bag or air tight container. 


Picture
Peppermint Scented Playdough (Edible)

You will need:
1 cup all-purpose flour (sift if lumpy)
1/2 cup salt
2 teaspoons cream of tarter
1 cup brewed peppermint tea
1 1/2 tablespoons oil (vegetable or canola)
1 tablespoon peppermint extract
Food coloring, as desired

How to make it?
  • In a sauce pan, whisk together the flour, salt and cream of tarter. Add the water and oil and whisk until smooth. 
  • Place pan over low heat and cook and stir until it thickens and forms a ball (about 5 minutes for a single recipe). When it's impossible to stir and looks like a big sticky lump, it's done! :)
  • Turn out onto the counter or a mat, scraping pan clean with a spatula. Knead the warm dough a couple times, and place in a loosely-covered container to cool. (Or, let the kids play with it right away!) Store in a sealed container or ziplock bag when not in use.

Picture
Chocolate Scented Playdough (Edible)


You will need:
1 cup all-purpose flour (sift if lumpy)
1/2 cup salt
2 teaspoons cream of tarter
1 cup water
2 1/2 tablespoons oil (vegetable or canola)
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

How to make it?
  • In a sauce pan, whisk together the flour, salt and cream of tarter. Add the water and oil and whisk until smooth. 
  • Place pan over low heat and cook and stir until it thickens and forms a ball (about 5 minutes for a single recipe). When it's impossible to stir and looks like a big sticky lump, it's done! :)
  • Turn out onto the counter or a mat, scraping pan clean with a spatula. Knead the warm dough a couple times, and place in a loosely-covered container to cool. (Or, let the kids play with it right away!) Store in a sealed container or ziplock bag when not in use.


Picture
Strawberry Scented Playdough (Edible)


You will need:
1 cup plain flour
1 Tablespoon oil
200ml Water
50ml Strawberry Essence
½ cup salt
¼ cup chocolate sprinkles
2 Teaspoons cream of tartar
1 Teaspoon of rose pink food colouring

How to make it?
  • Pour all dry ingredients, flour, salt and cream of tartar together in a saucepan. 
  • Add oil, food colouring, strawberry essence and water to dry ingredients.
  • I use a whisk before heating as I find this helps remove lumps and blends the ingredients.
  • Cook over medium heat constantly stirring until it becomes a thick blob. 
  • Then turn out onto a clean surface and knead into a smooth blob.
  • Allow the play dough to cool before kneading in the chocolate sprinkles.
  • Store in a plastic zip lock bag or air tight container.

Those are the basic ones to get you started, feel free to change it up and experiment - maybe add some glitter, or some pony beads, or even some hundreds and thousands! The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination allows. ;)
 
Picture
We have all seen those crafts on Pinterest and been guilty for creating one of those well known 'Pinstrosities'. Melted crayon art used to be one of my biggest, most common Pinterest fails because I always wanted to let the kidlets help with the actvity and it would never turn out quite right. So I have gone to the drawing board and come up with a list of new twists on the old trick and am here to share them with you week by week I will count down my favorite ways to do crayon melting that is kid friendly and far less likely to result in another 'Pinstrosity'. Today I am sharing a 'splattered' version of melted crayon art.

So to start off with you will need an old fork, a hairdryer/blowdryer, crayons and a canvas. Pick crayons that have contrasting colours, you can go for vibrant rainbow colours or you can go for a boy or girsl themed colour scheme or maybe even the colours of your favourite sports team or the colours of your countries flag - the options are endless, if you choose colours that you are happy with then there will be no possible way to end up with a canvas you aren't happy with.
You will need to break the crayons into different sized pieces, the smaller the pieces the better the end result in my opinion but for this tutorial I did one with bigger pieces to show you a little better how to hold and melt the crayons effectively. Not many people are aware that there is a thin clear wax coat on all wax crayons regardless of the quality or brand name behind them. To get the best melting effect with the crayons you can slightly melt them with the hairdryer then roll them on a piece of scrap paper or an old rag to remove the clear wax from the crayon. This eliminates that yuck watery dribble of clear wax that tends to ruin a lot of potentially great melted crayon artworks.
Grab your fork and stab it slightly into a piece of crayon ready to be melted. The fork helps hold the crayon in place on the flat lying canvas so that the force of the hot air does not blow it all about the canvas. I find that going from the top left corner and working down to the bottom right corner of the canvas looks the mst effective with this kind of crayon melting but you can place the crayons where ever you like and still have an equally awesome outcome. Hold the hair dryer directly above the crayon and fork until you see a residue form, then move the angle of the hair dryer so that it sprays out the melted crayon to create a 'splat' effect. Do this with as many colours as you like in whatever places you like on the canvas until you are happy with the end result.
That is pretty much it, with larger crayon pieces you will have something that looks like the picture below to the left, but with smaller pieces you can create something like the picture to the right. The possibilities of colour scemes and end results is limitless. Completely kid-safe, let them help and make a family art piece today!
 
Picture
Easter is a colourful exciting time of year for a child - and parents aside from the expenses. Every year I try to find age appropriate Easter themed craft for the kids to help them understand the basic 'hallmark' of the Easter holidays and eveyr year colouring Easter eggs always makes it to the list.

There are loads of ways you can colour an egg, the internet is full of methods, some use vinegar, some don't, some use food colouring, others use clothing dye - it all depends on how vibrant you want the colour to be on the egg. When colouring our eggs, we leave them raw and intact - can get messy with clumsy kidlets but it means that the eggs aren't wasted by being drained and avoids them going smelly if we were to boil then colour them, it also means we can use them for things like scrambled eggs or baking which is great!

Before dying our eggs we draw patterns on it with white wax crayons. The wax crayon creates a resistance to the dye so that when the egg is submerged in the dye, where the wax is, the egg remains it's natural colour. You can also use sticky tape or rubber bands to create patterns as well, even create a marbled effect by dripping hot wax over the egg before submerging it in the dye. The dye mix we use is 1/2 cup of water to 2 teaspoons of food dye - this is a pastel kind of dye that is kid friendly, if you want a more vibrant colour to the egg add a teaspoon of vinegar to the dye mix. To get the best results we usually try to leave the eggs submerged in the dye for at least 4 minutes.
              

Video Tutorial - How To Colour Easter Eggs.

Happy Easter Everybody!

 
"You are never too young to play with your food, all you need is a little imagination." - Emilie Moore (2011)
Picture
Education doesn't always have to be within the confines of worksheets and flashcards. There are millions upon millions of ways to teach children different things in a creative, exciting way. I mean, let's face it - would you rather have fun, or do worksheets all day? I don't know about you, but paperwork isn't exactly on my list of favourite things to do.


We all know kidlets love Fruit Loops, they are colourful, and sweet and outright tasty in the mind of a child. But have you ever considered using Fruit Loops to teach your special little person things like counting, sorting, colours, fine motor skills or patterns? If not, then welcome to the colourful world of creative learning in the eyes of yours truly! As Miss Arianna nears the age of schooling, I will be sharing more and more blogs on creative ways to teach your child basic life skills. This will include a huge range of ideas collected by myself to make learning feel, well, not like learning at all.

To create a 'workplace' for this activity get a piece of Styrofoam & 5 bamboo skewers. Colour (with crayons, felt pens, dye or paint - I used crayons) each skewer one colour each - red, orange,  yellow, green, blue & purple. Then place them in that order spike down into  the Styrofoam. I first asked them to sort the fruit loops into the colours and  place them on the corresponding skewers, then I asked them to name the colours  in a row. To make things a little trickier for them I asked them to count the  fruit loops on each skewer for me. So all in all, this nifty trick taught them  motor skills (getting the fruit loops onto the skewers), colours, sorting AND  counting all in one activity!

Pictured - Miss A and Mr J enjoying their first creative learning lesson :)
 
If there is one thing my son loves more than food it's definitely trains! So this year for his birthday I decided to do a train themed birthday party - however - I didn't want a licensed or character party so had to avoid the massive range of Thomas the Tank Engine & Chuggington. Because of this, I made all my decorations by myself :)

We'll start off with the biggest decoration of all - the pinata! I made this bad boy with 3 pieces of large poster cardboard, some tissue paper for decoration, masking tape to hold it all together, some string to tie it up with & glue. I miscalculated my measurements so I had to tape some extra cereal boxes lying around to add length & I used a toilet roll for the chimney of the train.

Here is the before decoration & finalized.
For the games we are doing simple ideas because the little ones will all be around the 2-5 year old mark. So we have chosen the pinata & a small game of pass the parcel. I was browsing through the shops the other day searching for pass the parcel goodies that fell into the theme of trains but couldn't find anything I liked that would suit both boys and girls. Just as I was about to leave I came across these pop up books which were on sale for only $1 each! I thought they were perfect but way too heavy for little ones to pass around 15 pop-up board books so I improvised. In each layer of the pass the parcel there is 2 candy rolls & a little note tied around them that reads "Choo Choo Choose A Book! :)" They will then at the end of the game go to the table where the books will be set for them to choose one of the 3 types of pop-up books available.
And below we have his cupcake toppers made with a 2" circle cutter & a sheet of printed circle designs. All you need to do is cut out what you would like on the top of the cupcake then use a hot glue gun (or any sturdy glue) to stick the cut out onto a toothpick or lollypop stick for you to place into the cupcake after you have iced them. Next is a decoration I made to stick into the ground - It is just a train cutout hot glued to some bamboo skewers. And on the end we have the front door sign - something simple, just a paper printout with some ribbon decorations.
Below is the self explanatory stuff - the cups, crayon boxes, colouring in sheets, party hats, the birthday banner & the snack containers.
Finally the take home party favours - I kept it train themed & made a DIY Train Track Candy Bag - It contains 6 m&m's, 2 strips of licorice and 6 chocolate coated licorice bullets. They look like the picture on the left & get set up like the one on the right.
The rest of the party remains a surprise until after the party on the 16th of February. :) There is loads of food fun & decoration ideas to share with you after that! :)
 
Picture
Back to school for most of you is fast approaching & some have even already started! For me, well, the kidlets aren't quite old enough for school or school lunches but that doesn't stop me from sharing some healthy ideas for lunch snacks. Today I ventured into the sweet & savory taste testing again while trying to think of new tasty nibbles to serve at Mr J's birthday party next month. And well, this is what I came up with.


Banana & peanut butter wraps are exactly what they say they are but with a scrumptious taste you would not expect. They are just as simple as making any other wrap or sandwich but give a new look & taste to the every day lunch box. To make these neat treats you simply spread peanut butter onto a sheet of pita bread (or wrap bread - whatever you prefer to call it) then place a peeled banana onto the peanut butter covered bread, you then proceed to roll up the banana in the wrap then slice it into little wrap rounds - it's as easy as that. They are perfect for lunch boxes & snacks on the go.

With CK101 giving you a little inspiration & motivation to get creative today - sugary snacks will be a thing of the past!

 
Picture
So today was both my first ever demonstration & my first ever market stall. To say that I was terrified would have been an understatement. Those who know me would have been well aware of my fear of public speaking & talking to crowds of strangers - today, I had to overcome both of those as I stood in the public eye of a nearby suburb at Highlands Farmers' & Community Market to hold both a stall & a demonstration where I taught children how to make their very own strawberry race cars. While it was a very chaotic day I must admit it was very fun & definitely a well awaited experience. It was so unusual to be standing on the other side of the markets instead of being a general market attendee. A big thank you goes out to Georgina, the market manager, for pulling it all off & allowing me to be a part of the first market of 2013 in Highlands. She did a fantastic job! I would also like to thank all those who popped by and said hello & everyone who also wished me luck - it was definitely needed & I don't think I would have gotten this far without your ongoing support! x