Chamomile Play Dough Recipe

Here’s a quick and easy no-cook, chamomile play dough recipe, perfect for calming sensory play time for kids!

We are big lovers of play dough in all of its amazing flavours and playful learning possibilities! So much so that we have an entire A to Z of play dough recipes and ideas to try, all collated from this blog over the past few years. We also have an article about the educational and developmental benefits of playing with doughs here.

My most favourite recipes to test out are the ones using natural ingredients such as our lavender play dough recipe and natural play dough pizzas. The lavender one is lovely because it also has a calming effect as the children play with it, and I wanted to try using chamomile to make a similarly relaxing recipe. We can all use a hand at that majorly cranky time of day and as a way for kids to relax before bedtime!

I slightly adapted our usual no-cook play dough recipe by using chamomile tea bags and their contents. Into the boiling water I added 2 chamomile tea bags and left them to stew for 5 minutes, before adding them to the usual mixture.

Chamomile play dough recipe:

2 cups plain flour

1/2 cup salt

2 tbsps oil

2 tbsps cream of tartar

Up to 1.5 cups boiling water, stewed with chamomile tea bags (see above)

Contents of 1 dry chamomile tea bag

Add the dry ingredients and oil, then pour in the chamomile water in increments, mixing as you go. The resulting mixture should be slightly sticky like regular bread dough. Turn it out onto a surface and knead it until it becomes smooth, soft and pliable without any sticky residue. Adjust by adding a small amount of flour if needed.

Once we had kneaded the dough, we sprinkled in the dry contents of one more tea bag, working the dried flowers into the dough until they were fully integrated.

If you had access to some real chamomile flowers you could dry, stew and/ or pound them for the same use. Let me know how it works out if you try it!

The result was a lovely, soft play dough with a natural yellowish tint and a fragrant, yet subtle, scent of chamomile. I encouraged the girls to smell it and hoped it would calm their senses as they played! This would make a great wind-down activity before dinner or bedtime at the end of the day.

The girls used jasmine flowers from the garden to decorate and push into the dough, adding even more lovely fragrance to the room! It would be nice to introduce other natural materials here too, such as sticks, pebbles, shells, glass gems, leaves and pine cones.

See all of our extensive Play Dough archives here!

See our round up of 10 Natural Play Dough Recipes here