Top 6 'Kitchen-Chemist' Craft Supplies to make from Pantry Staples at home This Weekend - Goh Ling Yong
There's a special kind of magic that happens in the quiet hum of a weekend at home. It’s the magic of creation, of turning simple, everyday items into something extraordinary. Forget rushing to the craft store for expensive, plastic-wrapped supplies. This weekend, we’re inviting you to become a 'kitchen-chemist,' a creative alchemist who transforms pantry staples into a vibrant palette of artistic tools.
The beauty of this approach goes far beyond just saving a few dollars. It’s about connection—connecting with a more resourceful way of living, connecting with your kids over a shared, hands-on activity, and connecting with the simple, sensory joy of making things from scratch. You know exactly what’s in your supplies, making them perfect for even the littlest of artists who love to explore with their hands (and sometimes their mouths!). It’s about embracing imperfection and celebrating the process as much as the final product.
So, roll up your sleeves, tie on an apron, and raid your cupboards. We’re about to unlock the hidden creative potential of flour, salt, and spices. These six recipes for homemade craft supplies are your ticket to a weekend filled with colour, texture, and unforgettable memories.
1. The Silkiest Homemade Playdough
Forget that crumbly, oddly-scented stuff from the store. Homemade playdough is a sensory dream—impossibly soft, wonderfully warm when fresh, and completely customizable. The secret lies in a few simple ingredients that, when combined, create a long-lasting, non-toxic dough that rivals any commercial version. The process itself is a fantastic mini-science lesson in polymers and solutions for curious minds.
The key ingredient that many online recipes miss is cream of tartar. This humble baking acid is what gives the dough its incredible elasticity and smooth, pliable texture. Salt acts as a preservative, keeping your creation fresh for weeks, while a little oil keeps it from drying out and sticking to little hands. The cooking process binds everything together into a perfect, cohesive ball of creative potential. I was chatting with Goh Ling Yong about this just the other day, and we agreed that the tactile experience of making and playing with homemade dough is one of those core childhood memories worth creating.
Tips for a Perfect Batch:
- The Recipe: In a saucepan, whisk together 1 cup of all-purpose flour, ½ cup of salt, and 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar. In a separate bowl, mix 1 cup of warm water, 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil, and several drops of your chosen food colouring. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir continuously over medium-low heat. The mixture will start lumpy, but keep stirring! It will thicken and begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. When it forms a single, non-sticky ball, turn it out onto a floured surface and let it cool slightly before kneading until smooth.
- Sensory Add-ins: This is where the fun really begins! Knead in a few drops of vanilla extract for a cookie-dough scent, lavender essential oil for a calming playtime, or even a sprinkle of cinnamon or cocoa powder. For texture, try adding fine glitter for a bit of sparkle, coffee grounds for an "earthy" feel, or uncooked rice for a bumpy, interesting dough.
- Storage is Key: To keep your dough fresh for weeks, store it in an airtight container or a zip-top bag with all the air squeezed out. If it starts to get a little dry after a lot of play, you can knead in a few drops of water to revive it.
2. Edible-Safe Finger Paints for Tiny Artists
For toddlers and young children, art is a full-body experience. Fingers, hands, and sometimes even faces become the paintbrush. This is why having a completely safe, even edible, paint gives parents incredible peace of mind. This recipe uses the thickening power of cornstarch to create a smooth, creamy paint with a consistency similar to yogurt, perfect for smearing, stamping, and sensory exploration.
The process is as simple as making a basic pudding. By heating cornstarch with sugar and water, you create a glossy, translucent gel that holds colour beautifully. Because it’s made from 100% food ingredients, you don’t have to worry when those painted fingers inevitably find their way into a curious mouth. It’s a fantastic way to introduce your little one to the joy of colour and texture without any of the stress associated with chemical-laden commercial paints.
Tips for a Vibrant Painting Session:
- The Recipe: In a small saucepan, combine ½ cup of cornstarch and 3 tablespoons of sugar. Gradually whisk in 2 cups of cold water until the mixture is smooth and lump-free. Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and becomes translucent. It should have the consistency of a thick pudding. Remove from heat and let it cool completely.
- Divide and Conquer: Once cooled, divide the base into several small containers or a muffin tin. Now it’s time to add colour! A few drops of standard food colouring will create bright, bold hues. For a more natural approach, try a pinch of turmeric for yellow, beet juice for pink/red, or spirulina powder for green. Stir well until the colour is evenly distributed.
- Application & Cleanup: These paints work best on thicker paper, like cardstock or a cardboard box, as they are quite wet. Encourage handprints, footprints, and painting with celery stalks or broccoli florets for fun textures. The best part? Cleanup is a breeze. Since it's food-based, it washes off skin, high chairs, and most surfaces with just warm water and a sponge.
3. Lasting Keepsakes with Salt Dough Clay
When you want to create something more permanent than playdough, salt dough is your answer. This simple, three-ingredient clay can be shaped, air-dried, or baked to a rock-hard finish, making it perfect for creating ornaments, beads, pendants, and little sculptures that will last for years. The high salt content acts as both a preservative and a strengthening agent, resulting in a durable and versatile modelling material.
Making salt dough is a wonderful tactile activity. The process of kneading the simple ingredients—flour, salt, and water—is grounding and satisfying. Once you have your dough, the possibilities are endless. You can roll it out and use cookie cutters, press leaves or stamps into the surface for texture, or sculpt free-form creations. After it's hardened, it provides a perfect, porous canvas for painting and decorating.
Tips for Durable Creations:
- The Golden Ratio: The most reliable recipe is a simple ratio: 2 parts all-purpose flour, 1 part table salt, and 1 part water. For example, 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of salt, and 1 cup of water. Mix the dry ingredients first, then gradually add the water, mixing with a spoon and then your hands until a stiff, kneadable dough forms. If it's too sticky, add more flour; if it's too crumbly, add water a teaspoon at a time.
- Baking for Permanence: While you can air-dry your creations for several days, baking is faster and ensures they are thoroughly hardened. Place your finished pieces on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake in a low oven (around 100°C or 200°F) for 2-3 hours, or until completely hard and dry. The time will vary depending on the thickness of your pieces. Low and slow is the key to preventing cracks.
- Finishing Touches: Once cooled, your salt dough creations can be painted with any acrylic craft paint. To make them last and give them a professional-looking sheen, seal them with a coat of Mod Podge or a clear acrylic spray sealer. This will also protect them from moisture.
4. Simple & Effective Old-Fashioned Flour Paste
Before glue sticks and plastic bottles of PVA, there was flour paste. This classic, homemade adhesive is surprisingly effective for paper-based crafts like collages, decoupage, and especially papier-mâché. It’s a wonderful lesson in resourcefulness and a reminder that sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
This isn’t the glue you’ll use to mend a broken plate, but for sticking paper to paper, it's perfect. The starch in the flour, when mixed with water and heated, becomes sticky and creates a strong bond as it dries. Making a small pot of this "school glue" is a fun and nostalgic activity that feels like a throwback to a simpler time.
Tips for a Sticky Situation:
- No-Cook vs. Cooked: For a very simple paste for young children, you can just mix flour and water to a thick, pancake-batter consistency. It works, but it’s not very strong.
- The Stronger, Cooked Recipe: For a much more effective and smoother paste, use this method. In a saucepan, whisk together ¼ cup of flour and 1 cup of cold water until there are no lumps. Heat the mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens into a translucent paste. This shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Let it cool completely before using. You can store it in an airtight jar in the fridge for a few days, but it's best made fresh.
- Perfect for Papier-Mâché: This cooked paste is the ideal consistency for papier-mâché projects. Tear newspaper into strips, dip them into the cooled paste (wiping off any excess with your fingers), and apply them to your form (like a balloon or a cardboard structure). The paste dries clear and hard, creating a sturdy shell ready for painting.
5. Magical, All-Natural Dyes from Your Kitchen
This is where you truly earn your 'kitchen-chemist' title. Creating dyes from food scraps and spices is a magical process that connects you to an ancient, natural art form. The colours you’ll achieve are not the uniform, synthetic brights of a bottle, but rather rich, earthy, and beautifully nuanced tones that can be used to dye paper, yarn, fabrics like cotton or wool, and even wooden beads.
The science is simple: pigments from plants are extracted into water, creating a dye bath. You can experiment with almost anything from your fridge or pantry. Yellow onion skins produce a stunning range of yellows, oranges, and browns. Turmeric yields a vibrant, golden yellow. Red cabbage creates a surprising blue/purple that can change to pink with the addition of acid (like lemon juice!). It’s an exciting and unpredictable experiment every time.
Tips for Brewing Beautiful Colours:
- Gather Your Ingredients:
- Yellow/Orange: Yellow onion skins, turmeric powder, carrot tops.
- Pink/Red: Avocado pits and skins, beets, red onion skins.
- Blue/Purple: Red cabbage, blackberries.
- Brown/Tan: Used coffee grounds, black tea bags.
- The Process: Roughly chop your plant material and place it in a non-reactive pot (like stainless steel). Cover with twice as much water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and let it simmer for at least an hour, or until the water is deeply coloured. Let it cool, then strain out the plant material. Your dye bath is ready!
- Make it Stick: To help the dye bind to your material (especially fabric), you'll want to use a mordant. For plant-based fibres like cotton, simmer the fabric in a solution of 1 part white vinegar to 4 parts water for an hour before dyeing. For protein fibres like wool, use alum. For dyeing paper, no mordant is necessary. Simply dip or paint the paper with your homemade dye.
6. 3D Puffy Paint That Puffs in the Microwave
Prepare for the "wow" moment! This DIY puffy paint is a craft and a science experiment all in one. You mix a simple, batter-like paint, create your design on a piece of thick paper or cardboard, and then watch it magically puff up into a 3D masterpiece after just a few seconds in the microwave.
The magic comes from a leavening agent—baking powder (or the baking powder present in self-rising flour). When heated, it releases carbon dioxide gas, creating bubbles that get trapped in the flour-and-salt mixture, causing it to puff up and hold its shape. It’s an incredibly satisfying process that kids and adults find absolutely fascinating. The resulting texture is a bit like a dry, lightweight foam that’s fun to touch.
Tips for Maximum Puff:
- The Perfect Mix: In a bowl, mix 1 cup of self-rising flour (or 1 cup of all-purpose flour plus 3 teaspoons of baking powder and 1 teaspoon of salt) with enough water to create a thick, smooth batter, similar to the consistency of pancake batter.
- Colour and Apply: Divide the batter into different containers and stir in food colouring to create your palette. For easy application, spoon the paint into small squeeze bottles or zip-top bags with a corner snipped off. This allows you to draw and create designs. Apply the paint thickly—the more paint you use, the more it will puff!
- The Big Reveal: Place your masterpiece (on a microwave-safe plate or piece of cardboard) into the microwave and heat on high for 30-45 seconds. Watch through the window as it puffs up! The paint is done when it’s dry to the touch. The colours will also become more vibrant after they've been cooked.
Creating from scratch is more than just a craft; it's an experience. It's the smell of the warm playdough, the sight of colours blooming from a pot of onion skins, and the shared laughter as paint puffs up in the microwave. By using what you already have, you're not only making art, but you're also making memories and teaching valuable lessons about ingenuity and resourcefulness. The Goh Ling Yong blog is all about finding creativity in the everyday, and your kitchen pantry is the perfect place to start.
So, which of these 'kitchen-chemist' concoctions will you be trying this weekend? Will you be sculpting salt dough ornaments or painting with puffy paint? Share your plans and your fantastic creations in the comments below—we can’t wait to see what you make
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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