Today’s favorite thing is our collection of playsilks. I first got turned on to playsilks back in Michigan where we would attend the biannual festival at our local Waldorf School. The kids got to dye their own silks and they used them for everything from capes to blankets to forts. They literally wore their silks to shreds from year to year and I finally started to invest in some decent silks of various colors.

True to form, Addison and Noah love their silks just as much as their older brothers did. In fact, don’t tell anyone, but Dalton has been known to tie one around his neck in superhero fashion even recently!

This past year I bought some “blanks” - plain white playsilks from Dharma Trading. When it was Easter season, I stocked up on Easter egg dye and saved it for a rainy day. This past fall I pulled it all out and Noah and I dyed our silks. The egg dye didn’t work as well as I would have liked so we bought some Koolaid and kept on going. The Koolaid worked great on top of smelling delicious!! So for just a few bucks, we had a dozen different colored play silks that we dyed ourselves.

Play silks are one of those very basic toys, like blocks, that are so simple and yet have endless imaginative possibilities. In addition, there is something very grounding about playing with toys made of natural fibers. The kids just keep coming back for more. We have real dress up clothes, Halloween costumes in two HUGE bins and pretend play items but its the silks my kids have used to death. They would much rather throw on a silk “cape” than a vinyl or polyester version of the same (both of which we own).

If you invest, I recommend Sarah’s Silks. I also recommend getting bold colors in hues that match nature - like blue for sky, green for grass, etc. But I also love our deep purple and red silks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Advent, Crafty, Things I Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.