Playdough Playoff - The Dryness Test

Pin It One factor I look for in The Best Homemade Playdough is how quickly it dries out.  Amazingly fun activities like playdough usually go from breakfast to meltdown.  V. will play with dough until she can't do a single thing and needs a nap right then.  The last thing I want is to get done changing V., putting her down for a nap, maybe going to the bathroom, forget what I was doing and start cleaning something, and then remember an hour later that I had playdough to clean up, finding it all dried up.  (This happens far more often than it should.)

I decided to line up small bits of playdough and see how long it took them to dry out.

4:25 - Fresh dough!
L-R: Classic dough, Jell-O dough, "rubbery" dough, Kool-aid dough, No-Cook dough.

5:25 pm:  The doughs are holding up fairly well with the exception of the "rubbery", gluten-free, purple dough in the middle.

9:30pm (had to leave the house for a while...)
The green, yellow, and orange dough were crusty, but not hard.  The purple dough is completely gone (but easy to clean up, as it is just dust!).  The (red) Jell-O dough is drier than it was, but not to the point where it is crusty!  I'll leave them out overnight.

7:30am - None have any fight left.  The green, purple and orange are the most crumbly, meaning they would be the easiest to get out of carpet, upholstered furniture, and abandoned toys.  If you wanted to sculpt and dry something, the yellow and red would be best, but they would need a few days to dry.