Salt Dough Ornaments

December 22nd, 2009 by Dionna | 2 Comments
Posted in Children, Eclectic Learning, Preschoolers, Teens, Toddlers

We finally finished the salt dough ornaments that we started last week. Last Monday we made the ornaments with our Monday Funday friends, we painted half of them last Friday with different friends, and today we finished painting the rest with our Monday Funday friends again.

Here is the recipe I used, from this site:

Ingredients

1/2 cup salt
1 cup flour
1/2 cup water
Rolling pin
Cookie sheet
Toothpick
Cookie cutters
Paint (I used Tempera paint & glitter paint; the original recipe calls for acrylic)
Ribbon

Jax rolling the salt ornament dough

Instructions

*Mix salt, flour, and water until dough is formed.
*Knead dough on floured surface until mixture is elastic and smooth. If dough is too sticky, sprinkle with flour (but don’t add too much flour or dough will dry and crack).
*Dust rolling pin with flour and roll dough to about 1/4 inch thickness.
*Cut out shapes with cookie cutters, you can also press your child’s hand into the dough and cut around it. I used a toothpick to write his name and the year in the handprint ornament.
*Use toothpick to make a hole for the ribbon.
*Put ornaments onto an ungreased cookie sheet and put in oven at 250 degrees.
*Bake for 2 hours (I think you could reduce the baking time; see comments below.)
*Remove from oven and cool.
*Paint! Once paint has dried, thread ribbon through.

Kieran watches our friend Joshua paint his teddy bear ornament

My Suggestions

The ornaments were super easy to make and fun for the kids to roll and paint. Here are my suggestions:

1) If you want the ornaments to last (especially if you are doing hand prints), make the dough thicker.

2) Don’t bake them so long. Several of our ornaments developed cracks in the back. They weren’t fatal, but I imagine they will be soon.

3) Make sure when the kids paint the ornaments, that the paint doesn’t pool. We noticed that the ornaments got a little soggy from the paint, so be careful about how wet they get.

4) The next time we do hand print ornaments, I’m going to add food coloring to the dough before baking and skip the paint afterward. The prints are pretty hard to make out now that Kieran has added paint and glitter glue.

Kieran concentrates while painting his gingerbread man

The handprints are hard to make out with the paint

I love this snowflake!

The gingerbread man's eyes creep me out a little bit

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