I saw the cloud dough exploration over at TinkerLab and I knew we had to try it too.

We used 24c flour (two bags), and 3c oil, plenty for the 7 kids we had playing. It was fabulous fun, I thought maybe I could bring it into school when we were done.

At least it was plenty for the first hour. Then the yard started looking a bit snowy.

By the end it was a lot snowy.

We don’t usually get much snow here.

I got to modeling clay stamping today after all, here is my city, with help from 1 year old Penelope. We’ll have to try this again tomorrow when Rebecca isn’t at preschool.

First we got a pound of random glass beads, I’m sure they are all rejects from some bead factory, but who cares if they have holes we aren’t going to be stringing them anyway. Rebecca and I started the day sorting them by color. I thought we would do a couple and get bored, but we made it through almost all of them, sorting glass beads is a lot of fun! Um, maybe I’m compulsive or something.

We didn’t try to make bowls, we spent the whole time mashing beads into the clay and pulling them out, smooshing beady clay up, picking it apart… It was great. They stuck with it much longer than most of the things we’ve done recently, usually somebody breaks for the tricycles and then it’s all over. So two thumbs up. Smooshy tactile salt-flour clay and pretty glass beads make a good combo.

And then we had naked running through the sprinklers in the back yard – but no pictures of that!

So Rebecca got some time to poke and prod sticky clay, and I got some time to hand build some plates for her doll house.  They’re a little wonky since they are hand built rather than thrown on the wheel, but they looked a lot better after I got to put lots of little dots all over them.  I was inspired by one of the bowls that Jennifer’s friend had decorated for their ‘Empty Bowls’ charity auction, which reminded me how much I like tiny dots.  The dots on the plates that I did first came out too big, I like the square cups better.  I hope they fire okay.