Magic Play Dough Halloween Treat Bags

 

 

I’d been wanting to make magic play dough for a while but never got around to it, until I started thinking about making some non-candy goodies for E’s Halloween party at school.

I saw these wonderful Play Dough Treat Bags on Onekriegerchick.com and originally wanted to make the pumpkin version. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the ghost but I didn’t want to just make plain play dough. Finally, I remembered the magic play dough idea and found it a perfect occasion to use it.

 

Instead of sweets, I made Halloween treat bags with homemade magic play dough for my daughter's friends!

(E was 35 months old.)

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.

 

 

 

To make Magic Play Dough Halloween Treat Bags, you’ll need:

 

 

 

I made a double batch of Learn with Play at Home’s no-cook play dough and separated it into 17 little balls for E and her 16 little friends.

Plain play dough isn’t really white, it always has a yellow cast to it but it didn’t bother me too much. If you want to make it look even more ghostly, you can dye the play dough white or use white store bought play dough.

And yes, I weighed the dough and calculated how big the individual balls needed to be 😉 I know I can’t make sure that no one feels like they got less or more than anyone else but I can make sure that their feeling isn’t true 😉 Looking back, I might have made 18 just so I’d have a trial piece but I didn’t think of it at the time.

 

Instead of sweets, I made Halloween treat bags with homemade magic play dough for my daughter's friends!

 

Instead of sweets, I made Halloween treat bags with homemade magic play dough for my daughter's friends!

 

I used my finger to poke a hole into each ball. Make sure it ends around the middle of the ball or even slightly deeper. My first poke felt quite deep but wasn’t deep enough.

I added a good squirt of gel food coloring,

 

Instead of sweets, I made Halloween treat bags with homemade magic play dough for my daughter's friends!

 

then closed up the balls very carefully. You obviously don’t want the food coloring to come out. This might be even harder with liquid food coloring or watercolors.

At first, I pinched off some play dough from the opposite side of the ball to seal the hole but that left me with balls that were bumpy on two sides until I finally figured out that I could carefully push up material from around the hole to keep the other side of the ball smooth. It looked something like this:

 

Instead of sweets, I made Halloween treat bags with homemade magic play dough for my daughter's friends!

 

My balls of play dough were a bit dry for some reason, so I added a touch of water while closing up the hole and smoothing out as many bumps as I could. I held the ball in one hand, dipped my other hand under running water, then used both hands to smooth. Be careful not to add too much and make the food coloring runny!

This way, the play dough was slightly tacky when I was done, so I let it sit for a few minutes to let the surface dry before putting it in the treat bags.

Pro tip: Make sure your treat bags don’t have the company name and copyrights and what not written on the side! The first ones I was going to use had that – and even worse, they said “Made in China” in fairly large letters across the bottom!

I somehow didn’t notice that when I bought them but when I did, I just couldn’t go ahead with them, it just gave a completely wrong impression 😉

The Wilton bags I ended up using (and that are linked above) have no writing, are sturdy and come with nice silver twist ties.

You’ll want to wash and dry your hands and the lower part of your arms before putting the play dough in the treat bag. Make sure the play dough goes straight to the bottom of the bag and doesn’t slide down to leave a residue.

I used a purple Sharpie {couldn’t find the black one but wasn’t unhappy with the purple, either} to draw a ghost face on the bags once the play dough went in. It would be a bit easier to do it before you put in the play dough but you risk it not being positioned quite right.

Finally, I made a little tag to explain what was in the bag and how to use it. I decided to include the instructions to start kneading the magic play dough inside the bag to avoid any nasty surprises with the food coloring behaving in an unexpected way for other people. I’m fully planning on letting E take it out of the bag right away, though 😉

I punched a hole each in the upper left corner of the tags, threaded the twist ties through and tied the bags closed.

 

I held the ball in one hand, dipped my other hand under the running water, then used both hands to smooth.

 

This might have taken a tad longer than I thought it would, and it wasn’t quite a no-brainer to close up the magic play dough balls without spilling the food coloring but I love how the treat bags came out, given I’m not really all that crafty or that much of a designer.

 

 

 

Have you made your own treat bags? Have you played with magic play dough before? Tell me all about it in the comments!

 

 

 

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11 Comments

    1. Thank you, Laura! I thought they came out really cute, too.

  1. Oooh, that could be a lot of fun… even just for surprise play at home! Thanks for linking to Tuesday Tots (and for sharing our no-cook playdough recipe in your post). I’ve featured this post today 🙂

    1. Thank you for the feature, Debs! You could definitely just make a batch for random play dough play at home!

  2. AAAAMAZING!!!!! I have never heard of this !! I’m SOO excited to find a way to incorporate it into our next gifting day at preschool!!!

    1. Thank you, Jeanine! So glad you like it 🙂 I was pretty tickled about this idea myself 😉

  3. Jenn Weekley says:

    We don’t have a lot of money for Christmas this year but I’ll be bookmarking this site to make cute gifts for my kids thanks for sharing!