How To Make Green Plasticine

Right, now I'm going to show you how to make plasticine. A plasticine has a lot of advantages over playdoh in that it wouldn't go off and would keep for really as long as you‘ll ever need it. Your children will lose it before it ever goes off.

Now, what we need, we've got our ingredients down on the table here. We've got some green crayons and this would obviously be to make green plasticine. I've got some shoe polish here.

This is just neutral shoe polish. Make sure it is neutral otherwise you've obviously chosen your colour before you even started and you're going to need some petroleum jelly, essentially Vaseline, there we go. You're also going to need a spoon as you need to mix these up and a heat-proof bowl.

You need to heat up the mixture of ingredients over hot water, essentially a bain-marie to make this work. So, the first thing we need to do is add some of our shoe polish. Obviously, the more you add, the more you're going to make.

We're just going to make a small amount today. Then, we need to take one of our crayons. I'll just take that, rip off the paper.

Now, the more crayons you add, the more green it's going to get. I think, probably for this, all we need to do is just add this half. Okay.

So now, we're going to have to heat this over the hot water and then later, we'll be adding the petroleum jelly. Right, so we're heating our water here. You can see it's about to come to the boil but we can already put our bowl in with our wax mixture.

We've got obviously our green crayon and we've got our shoe polish mixture in there. I just place that carefully in there. Obviously, don't let yourself get burned, right, and then as the heat starts to come through, it won't take long, this would start to melt.

Right, now after a couple of minutes, you'll see that the wax has almost completely melted. You could see there, just a small lump left and it's at this point that we're going to add our petroleum jelly. Now, it can take a bit of trail and error.

We haven't made very much so I'm only just going to take a small – about that much should be fine and we're going to put that in and let that get mixed around. Now, what I like to do at this point sometimes is to add a little bit of flour that would just give it a bit more consistency or help just to make it a bit more solid, a bit easier for you to play with it. As you can see, that petroleum jelly doesn't take long to mix and it's very thin, anyway.

So there we are, that's all nice and mixed in. I'm just going to take a little bit of plain flour. Remember, it's got to be plain flour because we've added heat and you don't want a rising playdough so we just put that in there, start to mix that around.

Don't worry about any lumps. Lumps are only a problem for water. Anything oil-based or wax-based, as you can see, lumps are easily coming out.

Right, so once that's all mixed in, all you have to do, put it in the fridge for about half a hour and once it's set, then you'd be able to take it out to play with. Right, so we've allowed our green plasticine to cool off in the fridge for about half an hour or so. It starts to cool down pretty quickly.

Obviously, if you wanted to make it really quick, you could just put it in some cold water in it almost immediately set. But you can see here, it's still a bit solid because it's been in the fridge. So we'll just take it out with a spoon.

It comes out quite nicely, there you go, and warm it up in your hands. Just the heat of your hands would be enough but as you can see, nice and pliable. You can put that into any shape you like.

Now, if you're finding it is a bit too greasy, all you need to do is put it into the microwave, in the pop, about 15 or 20 seconds, it will start to melt slightly, you add some more flour, give it a stir and then repeat the process with the fridge and then, you'll end up with something a lot more solid. So, that is how to make green plasticine. .