Salt Dough: How To Make Ornaments For A Knock Out Christmas Tree or Personalized Gifts!
Nov 07 '05
The Bottom Line A salt dough recipe that’s easy to make, great for kids crafts and uses items you already have in your kitchen!
Salt Dough: How To Make Ornaments For A Knock Out Christmas Tree or Personalized Gifts!
A salt dough recipe that’s easy to make, great for kids crafts and uses items you already have in your kitchen!
Our tradition of making salt dough ornaments started years ago; I wanted to make some handprints of the brood while they were still little - something that we could all look back on years later and wonder where the time went - OK, I am the only one that does that, they just look at me funny and hand me the box of tissues.. After trying more than a few recipes for salt dough I finally decided to throw caution to the wind and play around with them. What I ended up with was something that was easy to throw together, didn’t cost an arm and a leg, was easy for the kids to work with and yielded very nice looking ornaments. It doesn’t matter what your “crafting skill” is or if you are a complete dolt in the kitchen, if you can combine a few basic ingredients, work them together and use a cookie cutter - you can make these. You can keep things simple or make them as decorative as you want. These are great for kids to make to give as gifts to relatives and even if they don’t turn out looking like something that is store bought - it is a gift from the heart and something that any grandparent, aunt or parent would cherish and love receiving.
Let’s Get It Started!
Some of the things that you will want to have on hand include plastic or metal cookie cutters, a dowel or something to poke a hole into dough so it can be hung after baking, paints, a sealer to apply after painting to preserve the color and keep the ornament from falling apart and the ingredients for the salt dough. Please keep in mind, this is not edible. Sure it could be eaten because there’s nothing harmful or toxic in it but it doesn’t exactly taste all that great. For larger ornaments I suggest using the Wilton line of Comfort Grip cookie cutters, they are easy to work with and are great if you want to do a lot of decorating on the item.
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To make a batch of salt dough this is what you need:
10 ounces of flour - all purpose
10 ounces of salt
6 3/4 ounces of water
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
It is almost impossible to say how many ornaments you will get from a batch, it all depends on how large or small you are making them
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Mix the ingredients into a large bowl by hand - do not use a mixer for this or it will end up sticking to the blades or beaters. Mix it until it forms a ball, if it seems too wet or sloppy add equal amounts of salt and flour - I suggest one tablespoon at a time of each until you end up with a firm mixture. You do not want to make this too dry a mix or it will end up cracking when you bake. If this happens you can fill in the cracks with putty or just make another batch. After you have the mix at the right consistency just roll it out until it is about a quarter of an inch thick and use your coolie cutters to make shapes. Unless you are planning on doing a lot of painting I’d suggest going with basic shapes like hearts, Christmas trees and stars - that way you can paint them all one color and not have to stress over adding accents or details.
One thing you may want to do if you are making trees is to make about twenty to thirty small balls from the dough. Press them lightly so they have a little bit of a flat bottom and then bake them with the other shapes. This way you can paint these and add them to the Christmas trees for an extra touch. Once you have the shapes cut out just pop them in an oven that has been preheated to 350 degrees for about twenty minutes. Remember, you aren’t baking these for consumption so looking at them to see if they are brown around the edges isn’t going to work. I usually bake mine for about 18 minutes but you can let these go a little longer if you want to make sure they are completely ‘done’. You might see some small color changes once these are done baking but you have to let them cool completely before you start to paint and decorate them. Remember to add a hole to your ornaments before you bake them so that you can hang them up or tie them to a package.
Once you have allowed these to cool off you can use almost any type of paint on them to top them off. Spray painting them with a gold or silver metallic paint is one way to get the job done quick. For some extra glitz you can apply glue to the painted areas then sprinkle glitter to it. Regardless of how you decorate them you will want to make sure that you use some type of sealer on them. You can purchase spray cans of sealer and line them all up and give them a nice thick shot to get it over with quickly. Paint on sealers work just as well but take longer to dry; the benefit of using a paint on sealer is that you can apply it as thin or as thick as you like it. The more you add the glossier the sheen but the longer the drying time.
These are great projects for kids to make before the holidays. Teachers who have smaller classes might want to make these for arts and crafts; just bring in the ingredients and have them mix it and make the shapes. If you don’t have an oven at your disposal you can cover them with plastic wrap and bake them at home. Have kids bring in cookie cutters to work with or for older kids, have them make their own templates from cardboard. There’s no limit to what you can make from salt dough - small picture frames, hearts, stars, angels ... anything your mind can think up. If you want to go all out try looking for decorative soap molds; press the dough into the molds then tap them out of the mold and bake. This goes the same for candy making molds but you will want to make sure that you are using something basic, salt dough doesn’t usually come out of intricate molds very well.
The Bottom Line
This doesn’t have to be something that you only do around Christmas time; salt dough is great for Valentine’s Day, Halloween and any other holiday. With a little imagination you can do a lot with this very basic dough and it doesn’t require any special materials. In fact, I’d bet that almost everyone reading this has the ingredients to make the dough in their kitchen cupboard. There are no harmful ingredients in the dough but it isn’t all that tasty to snack on. Make sure you stress this to smaller kids - they see a mixing bowl and flour and they automatically assume that they are making something to eat. If you are going to use these to make gift tags for presents make sure that you roll the dough out evenly so you have a flat surface to work on. Any hey, if you forget to make holes in them before you bake them don’t get out the drill or Dremel and try to add one - you will end up cracking it. Just glue a hook on the back of it with a glue gun and improvise!
As always, thanks for the read!
~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~
© 2005 Freak369
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