Aromatherapy Play-Dough / CRAFTED Summer Camp

CRAFTED Marketplace hosted a Craft Summer Camp last month, where vendors throughout the market offered "camp-themed" crafts for kids AND adults! It was a blast! The theme really gave the vendors some creative inspiration - there were crafts of all kinds, like macrame keychains, friendship bracelets, dream catchers, mini succulents, clay mugs, hand/paw prints... and yours truly hosted aromatherapy play-dough!

 

I've been wanting to host some kid-friendly workshops for a while now to keep our youth involved, educated, and interested in nature's abilities. I heard about natural play-dough, or "slime" through a friend who makes it at home with her kids, and decided to give it a try. I searched through numerous recipes & articles online that claimed to be "natural", yet contained ingredients like "glue" or "hair conditioner". I finally discovered that a combination of flour, water, salt, & oil did the trick! Much like pizza dough, but WAY higher salt content to keep the dough dry rather than gooey.

 

Then, the fun part - dying your dough. Most recipes called for food coloring, which also isn't natural, so I looked to nature for colors:
Turmeric = yellow
Indigo powder = blue
Beet crystal powder = pink/red
Chlorella powder = green

 

I ended up only doing yellow or blue because those were the ingredients available to me. One student did figure out to mix yellow & blue for green!

For the essential oils, we used the mildest ones for handling; Lavender, Peppermint, or Orange. Orange does have a photosensitive effect so I advise not to go out in the sun with it, and to always wash hands after handling any of the play-dough's.

Overall, this was a really successful workshop! I probably made about 25 play-dough's, and I had a lot of fun doing it! I will be offering this again on July 28th & 29th, and August 25th & 26th, 12pm-3pm! Come out and bring the family for some crafts & Summer fun!