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Wednesday, October 7, 2015

October 7: Salt Dough Craft


Today I'm featuring a salt dough craft I did with the girls. This one took two sittings--on the weekend we made, cut, and baked off the salt dough, and today we colored our creations.

I found inspiration for the activity (and an easy salt dough recipe) through Pinterest. As I suspected, my younger daughter was very interested in helping to make the dough, and my older daughter was more excited by the process of decorating them once they were done.

This was my first time working with salt dough. The recipe I used called for 1 cup salt, 1 cup flour, and up to a cup of water. The directions said to add the water until a dough had formed but wasn't sticky. I added a touch too much water and ended up having to add extra dry stuff to get the consistency right.

In the end, I used 1 1/4 + 1 TBSP each of salt and flour, and about 1/2 cup of water.

Once our dough was ready, my helper rolled it out. (I had to help her because she exerted too much pressure and over-flattened the portion I'd given her. Good news: the dough is easy to scoop up and start again.)

 Rolling our salt dough with the cutest miniature rolling pin ever.
 

The original activity was supposed to be colored salt dough leaf impressions. I had sent the girls outside to collect leaves and we tried pressing them into our dough to make the impression.


Note: I left the leaves on the dough here solely for the sake of the photo. We did NOT bake the leaves.

However, we either didn't press hard enough or didn't choose veiny enough leaves because our impressions weren't as pronounced as the ones on the website I'd consulted. No matter. I made an executive decision mid-way through the activity to abort mission on the impressions and grab my assorted seasonal cookie cutters to use up the rest of the dough.

Here's a sampling before they were baked. Clockwise from top left: leaf impression, ghost cutout, moon imprint, apple, 
mini ghost imprint, mini moon cutout, lead impression attached to a mini bat cutout, leaf impression

Those baked in a 200 degree oven for two hours, then got flipped over and baked for another hour until they were dry. I let them cool on the pan overnight.

After baking and cooling


 In this photo, you can see how the impressions weren't deep enough.


Decoration time!!! I set the girls up with crayons and let them create.

As usual, they were not in the mood to be hedged-in by an autumnal color palette. Rainbow leaf, anyone?

I tried tracing the leaf outline on one and my daughter colored the leaf part; I also 
decided to try a hand imprint with the last remaining dough. She insisted on coloring that, too.

 Here's the leaf impression I colored. I also did the red apple and the orange pumpkin. 



So there you have it. Our fall-themed salt dough craft. This will be fun to revisit around Christmas when we can poke holes in the top of our cutouts (prior to baking) and them hang them on our tree.

Oh, and PSA from our dog: even though they look like cookies, they are NOT edible. Don't try to eat them.

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