Valentine’s Day Play Dough Mat Printable (+ Cleaning Our White Table!)

What’s your philosophy when it comes to kids getting messy? I’m pretty relaxed about it. I think it’s fun to squish and smush and sprinkle, so we do A LOT of that at our house. If you come to visit me without a warning, you better believe our home will be littered with toys and our table sticky with play dough and cookie crumbs. I’m trying to get better at having a daily cleaning routine and decluttering our home, but we won’t be stopping getting a little messy every day! It’s so fun! One of our favourite mediums is play dough, so one morning last week we cracked open the dough and I made some fun Valentine’s Day themed play dough mats for the girls.

These were really fun to play with, and they provided my girls an opportunity to practice making letter shapes and being creative.

Little A mainly squished and rolled the dough and smashed it onto the paper in random blobs, but she still loved it!

My Little C is older and a bit more of a perfectionist, so she wanted to copy the flowers and cupcakes I made on my mat and vary the colours.

Here’s a free printable of this Valentine’s Day themed play dough mat that you can download! Click here to open up a PDF version of the play dough mat, and print them off to use at home.  Your kids can roll play dough into coils to make the “LOVE” letter shapes or the flower shapes, practice making cupcake topping shapes, and practice heart and bow shapes.

After play dough, we moved on to painting some heart ornaments for Valentine’s Day with tempra paint. On our white table! This kind of thing makes me squirm just a little, but I’ve learned to put down paper for painting projects and go with the flow.

Mistakes have happened (that’s a blob of gold acrylic paint, above), but I’ve found it’s pretty easy to whip up another batch of DIY chalk finish paint and quickly paint over the top of my table again. The cool thing about chalk finish paint, is that you can paint right over any wax you have on the previous layer. Easy!

Otherwise, I’ve found that a good scrub with a nice cleaner and a regular ol’ kitchen cloth will clean everything else on our white table perfectly. Lately, I’ve been using naturally-derived Green Works Glass & Surface Cleaner on my table and my kitchen cupboards and it works awesome! When I’m in a hurry, I reach for a Green Works Cleaning Wipes, and those work well and they’re super-duper handy too.

The Green Works Glass & Surface Cleaner teamed with a microfiber cloth is what I use on all of my glass cabinet doors and chrome hardware, and they get really sparkly really fast!

I’m definitely learning that I CAN have a white kitchen table AND enjoy fun messy crafts with my girls. Hooray!

Disclosure: Many thanks to Green Works for sponsoring today’s post, and for sending us a box full of crafts so that we can make our own #gloriousmesses!