The children have been really excited about Easter this year. A few members of our family are visiting from France on Sunday, and we made Play Dough Surprise Easter Eggs for the occasion.
Every single day in the past few weeks, Crevette has asked me whether we could make something for Easter and so far, we have made truffles, Easter chick cards, cress heads, toilet paper roll bunnies, surprise Easter eggs and he is trying to convince me to make chocolates as well at some point. Just a tad over the top, little man!
The play dough Easter eggs were great fun to make. As Jumpy (1 year 5 months) is allergic to wheat, we started by making our ‘free from’ play dough (recipe here) on Sunday. We doubled the recipe so they could play with half of the dough straight away and kept the other half in a zip bag to make their surprise Easter eggs another day.
Play Dough Surprise Easter Eggs: Instructions
Crevette (5 years 9 months) and Beanie (3 years 6 months) enjoyed measuring the ingredients, mixing them together and kneading the dough once it had cooled down.
They really loved adding glitter to the dough and selecting four colours. They chose not to put too much food colouring in the dough to keep it all pastel and Spring-like.
Their favourite part was choosing scents to add to their dough. They spent ages smelling everything I could find that would be safe to add to the mix and deciding what scent would best suit each colour. They added peppermint extract to the green dough, almond essence to the orange, vanilla extract to the pink and lemon essential oil to the yellow one. It smelt heavenly when they were making pretend cakes on Sunday!
We had plastic eggs from the pound shop, but they were really small and we were wondering what we could find that would actually fit in our play dough surprise Easter eggs . We spent the week looking through our craft supplies and wherever we went this week, we tried to find tiny objects. It was a fun hunt in the end! We ended up with buttons and cut felt shapes (thanks again Anna for those great ideas) and found feathers in one of our craft boxes, mini farm buttons and scrapbooking embellishments in another. When we went to the zoo yesterday, they were selling small animal rubbers. We got three of those. Another trip to the pound shop got us more rubbers (12 butterflies, flowers and ladybirds for £1) and a box of tiny chicks.
Today, we were all ready to go and got to work on our play dough surprise Easter eggs . The children were delighted to make some for themselves and a few for their friends and Mamie (grandmother), too. I know that most people would not normally show their children what they are getting for Easter (or make the stuff with them for that matter). I told mine we were the ones getting the Easter treats and we would leave them in a big bag for the Easter bunny to find them easily and hide them in the garden on Sunday morning. They are also aware my friend Cé got some goodies for them, but I left them in the ‘secret’ bag and they know they are not supposed to look.
After they had decided what was going in each plastic egg and had a bit of fun with it all, they rolled their dough and wrapped it around the eggs.
I helped them at that point to try and make the eggs look smoother and wrap them in cling film to make sure the dough would not dry. We chose some ribbon to make the eggs look prettier and it was all done! The children closed their eyes as they were putting their creations in the secret Easter bag.
This looks fantastic. How cute too what a great creative idea. So fun too. Happy Easter. #PoCoLo
Happy Easter to you, too! Enjoy the long week-end. x Mel
Oh this is such a good idea and so different I love it! We haven’t done huge amounts for easter this year, though will have a mini hunt for Monkey i think. love this though! xx #pocolo #wotw Happy Easter!
Happy Easter to you too! Monkey is still small, isn’t he? If Crevette was not asking me to do crafts constantly, I very much doubt we would be doing that much ourselves. x Mel
Fabulous idea – really original. The colours are just right -which I know from experience is so hard to achieve with food dye!
#PoCoLo
I found the colours a bit dull to start with, but the children wanted them to look light and you are right, they did well in the end! Mel
Very nice! We wanted to make some scented play dough the other day but I didn’t have any oils left so we just added some of the children’s strawberry scented shampoo. Not as good as proper scented oils but it was okay-ish!
That’s a good idea! I would never have thought of doing that. Mind you, now that I am thinking about it, I think I remember reading somewhere that you could made play dough using only corn flour and scented conditioner. Probably from ‘The Imagination Tree’ again. Anna is ever so resourceful! x Mel
They look brilliant! Glad you’ve had such a fun week, and hope you have a lovely time with family on Sunday. Thanks for sharing with #WotW x
We are all very excited about the family coming on Sunday! x Mel
Lovely easter idea. Hope you have a good easter #WoTW
Have a nice Easter as well, Karen! Mel
What great fun!
Happy Easter x
Thanks and Happy Easter to you, too! x Mel
How great do these look! And what beautiful Easter-esk colours too! #PoCoLo
Thanks! Mel
Now I understand the importance of how small those animals had to be ;-)) It looks fab as always ! Lucky children Xxx
Merci ma belle! So glad I spotted them at the zoo. They are seriously cute, and Jumpy spent a good twenty minutes (no moaning or throwing involved!) playing with the lion and the tiger yesterday. Guess who is getting them for Easter? x Mel
Love this idea. Really nice, and creative for the children (as well as a surprise)
They loved putting the surprises together and choosing who would be getting what. Hours of fun! Mel
What a gab idea, I used to love making play dough for my two when they were little 🙂 #WotW
The children really enjoyed the whole process, it was worth doing. Mel
What a really wonderfully creative idea 🙂 It sounds like the children had a great time and the photos are beautiful 🙂 thank you for linking to PoCoLo 🙂 x
They had a great time and so did I! x
Those are absolutely incredible – I’m amazed at how great they look (and smell too by the sounds of it!). I’m so impressed as I’m terrible at doing crafts with my kids.
I hope you had fun with your French family – we’ve got Mamie visiting at the moment too 🙂
That really was a great little thing to do as the lovely scented play dough got used three times: when we made it, when we made the eggs, after they found the eggs in the garden. It was really worth the hassle and there were no play dough crumbs left everywhere (bonus!). Enjoy having Mamie around. Your children must be happy!
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