Colouring our Days with Playdough

May you always have work for your hands to do.

May your pockets hold always a coin or two.
May the sun shine bright on your windowpane.
May the rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near you.
And may God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.
~Irish Blessing

Our days have been filled with rainbows here lately, with our artwork, marbling and rainbow colouring. We have also seen the occasional rainbow in the sky towards the hills. Ess has longed to follow them until we find the pot of gold at the end of it. Secretly, I think we all wish we could find it. However often the rainbow's end is apparently atop another family's house (sigh).

Ess is very passionate about colour at the moment and particularly all the colours of the rainbow. I recently asked her to choose her seven favourite colours over here so I could begin to plan my next blanket as I have finished the one I have been knitting for little Eee. Yes, I have finally finished it. She's still 2, that is still classed as a baby isn't it?? :) Ess chose seven pinky/purply tones and then finally wrote down "all of them" on her list. The selection is a lovely array of colour isn't it!

Here Ess is creating her own rainbow using the new playdough we made today along with our older colours which have become a lot less vibrant over the years. We think it looks fabulous.

Little Eee was adamant that I photograph the little balls we made together which she rolled and collected often requesting new ones from me to add to her growing collection.

I love to watch the way the children play and how it changes over the years. Little Eee's chubby hands are keen to explore the texture of the dough seeing how it moves, crumbles, cuts, rolls, squishes etc. She's also very keen to observe others making sausages and balls and rainbows and plaits.

Ess is keen to use colour to create patterns. She began with her own rainbow and followed this with a pattern made of shapes - all in red, the brightest of our new colours. Seen in the background of the above photograph.

These are the three new colours of the day, somewhat distorted in this image. They are actually red, orange and purple. I wonder how they look on your screen!

Learning to plait with playdough was very intriguing for Ess.

She was delighted with her result, as was I.

I guess it was the three new colours which drew me to plait the dough together. As a teenager I often plaited others hair and was in high demand in boarding school. I have never tried plaiting dough however. It seems like too much effort to me to plait together pieces of dough before placing them into the oven to make a loaf of bread.

So despite the sunny days of winter we are currently enjoying, it is still lovely to be cosy inside with my girls enjoying creating together with bright colours that delight our hearts and inspire our minds.