Christmas Craft: Salt Dough Decorations

As it’s nearly Christmas (yay!) this month I decided to write a blog about creating easy Christmas decorations that are cheap and easy to make. Using all natural ingredients, it’s a great eco craft activity for the whole family to enjoy.

Simple Ingredients

These really are incredibly simple to make, and your little ones will enjoy making and decorating these with you. They’ll also make a great solo project, and a fab personal present.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• plain flour
• table salt
• water

Yep – that’s literally it!

To make the salt dough you need to get 1/2 cup table salt

1/2 cup water

1 cup all-purpose flour

Blend ingredients together in a mixer (if you have one) until a sticky dough forms. Now I’m not lucky enough to have a mixer, so I used my hands. I kept working the ingredients together, and the dough came out lovely. It doesn’t matter if you have a mixer or use your hands, the dough will come out just as well. It’s just your hands will be less tired if you use a mixer!

Keep working on the dough and kneading it until you get a nice play-doh like texture. If the dough still feels a bit sticky just sprinkle some more flour in until it has a better consistency. Once the dough has smooth elastic consistency, you can start making your decorations!

Once you’ve rolled out your dough (1-2 cm thick) you can start to cut out your shapes.

I used heart and star shaped cookie cutters, and I also used a bear shaped cookie cutter to make a bear each for Jacob and Nic.

I also cut a few leaves out using a knife, as well as a couple of other experimental shapes. it’s great to have fun with it and experiment. I decided to play around with pressing flowers and dried cow parsley into the dough to give some nice textures and patterns to the decorations.

Don’t forget to poke holes into the decorations so you can thread twine through to hang them up.

After you have your cut outs, stick them on a tray and pop them in the oven at 200degrees for about 5 hours or so.

Don’t let them brown, the purpose of this is to dry them out, not cook them.

Once the ornaments are dried out and nice and hard, it’s time to decorate them.

Before decorating mine I gave them a little sanding down with some sand paper to make the sides and edges nice and smooth.

I was happy with how mine came out, but I will say, if you’re going to mark or score your ornaments they may come out a bit bumpy. My teddy bears have actual pot bellies because I scored my boy’s names into them!

You can decorate these with any artist paints, watercolours, acrylics, or most paints you have to hand.

The best and most eco friendly option is watercolours and kids poster style paint. I highly recommend the Okonorm range of paints, they’re made from natural ingredients and are totally amazing!

Using these kinds of paints also means it’s a perfectly safe activity to do with your children.

I experimented a lot with different paints when decorating my ornaments. In the end I decided the finish I liked most was a watercolour wash. I liked this because it showed off the imprints of the flowers I’d pressed into the dough before baking.

I had great fun making and painting these, and I’m really pleased with how mine turned out. I love anything natural and I love Gypsophila and and cow parsley so I was keen to incorporate them into my decorations, as well as lots of greens and blues which are my favourite colours.

But the great thing about these decorations is that you can decorate them however you want and you can get really creative and messy with the kids too. You could even go out and forage for lovely natural treasures with your children that you can use to decorate your ornaments with.

But in the end, no matter how you decide to decorate your ornaments, the most import thing is to have fun!

Thanks to Emily for sharing another great craft activity with us all. Making craft fun with Babipur x

You can find lots of craftiness at Babipur!