Let's Get Messy!

Today, someone started out a little cranky.  It wasn't me.  I decided that in an effort to keep his attention and redirect some negative energy, we were going to do one of the messier toddler activities I've found on Pinterest.  (Is my Pinterest addiction showing?)  We made cloud dough.  I found the activity on Pinterest from this blog, who found it here.

The recipe is easy.  You take 8 cups of flour and 1 cup of baby oil, mix it really well for a few minutes, then play. 

I made half the recipe because I didn't think we'd need that much.  I was wrong.  I should have made the whole amount, and used a much larger storage container/box.  A lot of the dough ended up outside of the box it was in. 

We had fun, and got messy.  Here's what we did:

First, I measured 4 cups of flour into my container, and added 1/2 cup of baby oil to it. 

I mixed and mixed, and had lots of fun with that.  It's really soft!  I love the smell of baby oil, so I enjoyed this part.

This is all mixed and ready to go.  I have several different sets of measuring cups.  This one we don't use much, so now Colin gets to use them. I laid an old sheet on the kitchen floor, since I knew this would get messy.  I sat down with the little man, after taking off his tee-shirt as a precaution, and showed him what this stuff was about. 

He wasn't sure about it at first, so I added a shovel from a shovel/pail set I picked up on clearance last fall.  It was waiting for summer, but came in handy today.  Then I added a plastic drinking cup that Grandpa gave us.  It will be a while before he can drink out of it, so for now it's a toy.  After that...things got messy...

And ended up like this:

I was able to pretty easily pull the sheet up and save the cloud dough that spilled.  Then I shook the sheet out in the backyard, put it in a plastic shopping bag for storage, and put the lid on the box with the tools in it.  I expect we'll be playing with this pretty frequently, so we'll wash the sheet later.  I will need to get a bigger container and make the other half of the dough.  I think that will make it more fun, and easier to contain the cloud dough.  I also wondered if I could add food coloring to the oil to make it more fun.  Thoughts?  Has anyone tried that?