I got a big box of 1oz containers of Play-Doh to use in class, and the students keep not returning the red ones… 
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You should make them write “I will not steal the nice teacher’s red play-doh” a hundred times in Hittite cuneiform.
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How deep are you pressing the seals into the play-doh? The historical examples I’ve seen are pressed much deeper. Also, play-doh isn’t really good for holding impressions. Maybe get some plasticine or other non-hardening modeling clay?
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Hardening clay would be fine, I think. Then the students get a hard “scriptboard” without needing an oven. Only thing to worry about is to keep the raw (yet unused) material tightly packed without letting air at it.
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Good point! That’s what I used for the first pictures at the top of the thread, but I don’t have access to any at the moment. I’ll see if I can get some in the next few days to take better pictures with.
(For class purposes, Play-Doh is much easier to clean up, which is a big point in its favor—but for a demo like this, that’s not a problem.)
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Unless it gets in your hair. Which happened to me only last year, so heed my warning.
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Really? That almost definitely seems like it would be a test-case of “what things Play-Doh needs to be easily removed from.”
Usually with Play-Doh the trick is to let it dry out completely and it crumbles away. Is it an issue of "You need it out of your hair right now and using water makes it stickier?
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It was an issue of, as you really should have guessed, a couple of 4-year-olds. One wanted to style my hair while I played Play-Doh with the other, and like an idiot, I said, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” And I felt that this little’un was dreadlocking me and figured I could sort that out later, but failed to realize that she’d been rolling the locs with Play-Doh. Which OF COURSE she was doing. I tried the whole “let it dry out” thing, but dreadlocks made with grimy Play-Doh don’t play by the rules. It was a weird few hair days, topped only by the time I bought into the “mayonnaise makes your hair shiny” thing and then tried washing the mayo out with hot water, which cooked the egg in it and fused it to my hair.
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Goodmorning dear! You smell positively breakfasty!
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what a misadventure !
mis-ADVENTURE ? hmmm… I’m sure that “cleaning really messy hair” IS a solid puzzle…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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A sign that you have been playing too much IF, for sure, if you think cooked-egg-on-hair makes a solid puzzle. 
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It took DAYS to wash all the egg off and get rid of the smell. My labmates never let me live it down. Egghead and all that.
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The self-hardening clay I usually encounter (Sculpy) comes in lumps the size of two or three fingers and are individually wrapped in plastic. One or two lumps should be enough for one impression and there are no leftovers to deal with.
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