Wild Orange Fairy Dough

This weekend, my home sustained a massive glitter explosion. So, for the past couple of days, every time my kids pad (or maybe trudge) down the hallway, they leave tiny tracks of gold sparkles. My home is, well, glittery — even after vacuuming multiple times and washing the floor Cinderella-style. Baby K was the culprit who located and gleefully emptied a family-size container of glitter into the play kitchen oven. She also “washed” her play dishes and the playroom floors with it. I’m now surprised that I’ve made it through 5+ years of parenting without witnessing such widespread bedazzling. And I now understand why so many mommies out there have banished glitter. Turns out, it’s sticky and HA-ARD to clean up!! 

So here’s why the glitter was within arm’s reach to begin with. Miss R and I had just finished crafting a batch of glittery and orange-scented fairy dough! It’s a fairy-approved concoction that can double as a pixie habitat. Fairy dough carries its name because it is silky, soft, pixie-dusty, and so easy to make, it’s like magic! 

What You Need (and please, take proper precautions with that glitter!) 

• Hair Conditioner 
• Corn Starch
• Glitter
• Mixing Bowl
• Food Coloring (optional)
• Essential Oil (optional) 

How it’s Made: 

1. Empty one cup of hair conditioner into a bowl. If you use scented conditioner, your dough will assume that aroma. 
2. Sprinkle in a generous amount of glitter. I recommend adding the glitter at this point, though I’ve also added it later (as seen in the pictures) and the result is just fine.
3. Using a large spoon and your hands, mix the glittery conditioner with 2.5 cups of corn starch. 

   

4. Knead the dough with your hands for a few minutes and evaluate the texture. Add more conditioner if the mixture is too flaky, and more corn starch if it’s too wet. It will take a bit of kneading to know what ingredient is lacking, if any. 
5. If desired, add a few drops of food coloring and essential oil. Miss R adores Wild Orange essential oil, so we added that and hoped it’d make our dough all the more invigorating and uplifting. Despite my suggestion to use orange coloring to match the oil, R selected yellow. So now we have a light, bright, glittery dough fit for a fairy. 

Making the dough was just as fun as playing with it afterwards. But when Miss R finished, she continued to add glitter, form clouds and fairy beds, and daydream about pixie dust. Little did we know that mere minutes later, baby K would try her hand at the whole pixie dust theme and orchestrate a glittery fairy land.