Play Dough

I love play dough.  Niamh - poor, neglected waif that she is, has been begging me to make her some for over a week now.  However, play dough + mess + house on the market = point where mama puts her foot down and acts like some sort of tyrannical nay-saying overlord of fun killing oppression.  (Have you ever tried to dig play dough out of floorboards?  It's crap.  That's all I'm saying.)

After a busy weekend of open house, however, today I decided to lift the ban.  Partly, because I was also bored from the distinct lack of fun around here, and partly because well, what the hell.  But mostly because I was wracked by mummy guilt every time my foot-dragging, down-trodden oppressario scuffed her way past me, flashing me looks to see what effect her obvious and abject misery were having on my heartlessness.  (None.  Cough.)  Also, well, I was inspired.  I have discovered Filth Wizardry.

Whoa.  Talk about uber-mum!  It's the kind of blog you read and then instantly wish you were a child in that house.  Or a mum with that kind of awesomeness.  In fact, I heartily recommend you stop reading my pointless blog immediately and link over there at once.  I am not worthy.

Anyway, (why are you still here?!) while perusing page after page of awesomeness on the weekend (hours spent sans offspring and dogs left me with WAY too much time on my hands), THIS particular post caught my attention.  Dinosaurs?  Play dough?  That sounds like something a certain dinosaur-obsessed child I know could enjoy!

Here is our effort, in photos.

The underlying structure (made from two boxes, some balled up paper and aluminium foil).

Layering on the play dough

Cellophane for erupting volcano, lake and waterfall (Niamh's stingy mother drew the line at adding a real water feature...play dough ingredients were in too short supply to risk ruining a batch with a real water feature!)

Adding a few pipecleaner trees and some dinosaurs (it was around this point that I was regretting my decision to put ALL my craft supplies in storage until we move...)

Life on dino island is a little crowded.  Like Ibiza in summer.  But with an erupting volcano and neighbours who eat each other.

Final version, Mark I, with rosemary and mint trees.  Oh, and some of the dinosaurs are wearing "coats" which is apparently why they have pipecleaners balanced on them.  (Think I might need to work on offspring's application of effort, though obviously not her imagination, cos really...coats??)  And don't even mention poor Pteranodon, who frankly is having a really bad day after flying slightly too low to check out the volcano just prior to its Vesuvius impersonation...  Don't feel too bad for him, though.  He had a swim in the water, which apparently washed the lava right off him...  Some of the other dinosaurs weren't so lucky, and got "dissolved" by the lava.  (Once again, Ibiza springs to mind, only it's a different kind of fire-water that does the dissolving there...)

The brilliant thing about layering the play dough over the top of an underlying structure is that when you're done playing, you can just peel it all off and put it in ziplock bags to build all over again next time (which we've done, twice).  And then you can wrap yourself in cellophane and dance like the sun:

This performance inspired the creation of a sun mask, which is still a work in progress since we ran out of sticky tape halfway through.  And also I just realised that my elastic, which would have affixed said mask to sun child's head, is now packed.  In storage.  Dagnabbit.