I spent the week at my mom and dad’s house last week. I brought a handful of projects with me because the temperatures were forecast to be very chilly and I knew we’d be hanging out inside a lot. When I sat down to work on a book project, the first thing I asked was “Where is the Playdough Board?”

You might not have grown up in a house with a Playdough Board, but it was one of the most essential art making tools I had when I was growing up. It started out as the piece of countertop that was cut out to put in our kitchen sink. My mom and dad built our house. Dad is an architect and all-around pretty skilled crafty guy, so to save money, they did a lot of the work themselves, with 2 year old me toddling along with my tools and a pencil after him. When they cut out the space to put in the kitchen sink, they saved that large rectangle of countertop and it became the Playdough Board.

When I was a little kid, it was the surface you played with Playdough on, as the name suggests. We plopped it in the middle of the dining room table or more often the living room floor and the Playdough had to stay on the board (so it wasn’t getting smooshed into the placemats or the carpet). The board was smooth and indestructible, easy to wash, and just the perfect size for two little girls to build fancy playdough birthday cakes on. As I grew up, it became the everything board. Anytime you had a project that needed to be wet, sticky, taped down, pressed, stamped, or glued, you pulled out the Playdough Board to work on. In my house, there were a lot of these kinds of projects.

So when I wanted to work on glueing the covers on a new book project, the Playdough Board was the thing I needed and I put it right in the middle of the living room floor. It’s had an upgrade since I was little, so it now has a cutout to be a lapdesk since my parents aren’t so much into sitting on the living room carpet anymore. I’m starting to think that I might need to have one of my very own. Maybe I’ll keep an eye out at the architectural salvage places around and see if I can’t snag my own piece of counter top for future art adventures (and maybe a little Playdough.)