Salt Dough Ornaments

I thought it would be fun to make some sort of ornament with Emma for the Christmas tree this year.  Knowing she's not too coordinated and wouldn't understand my instructions I needed something easy!  I found a pin on Pinterest for salt dough ornaments that I thought just might fit the bill.  The dough was simple enough to make, the tricky part would be to get Emma to spread out her hand for me to make an impression of it in the dough.  But she did a great job and we ended up getting some ornaments!

 

For the dough:

2 cups flour

1 cup salt

1 cup water

Mix the ingredients together, adding enough water to form a dough.  Knead by hand for several minutes to make sure it is well mixed.  If the dough is too sticky to work with add more flour, if too dry add more water.

Then roll out the dough pretty thin and make your hand (or feet) impressions and cut out using either a large cookie cutter or glass. 

I also used my metal punch set to stamp in Emma's name and the year.  And make sure to use a straw or some other sort of instrument to make a hole to string ribbon through your ornament for hanging!

The first round I rolled the dough out too thick and when I dried them in the oven they puffed up a lot as you can see here, the one on the right puffed up deforming the hand shape a little :

  So I started over and rolled the next round a lot thinner and it worked better as you can see from the hand print on the left.  I also made sure to prick the dough over the entire surface with a pin before baking.  To harden the ornaments bake at 200F for 3 hours. 

I painted the dried ornaments with craft paint and glitter glue to outline the hand prints, as you can see from the dough picture above, the impression was not that visible but painting helps to define the print.  And I used a sharpie to help define the name and year stamp.

I then sprayed both sides of the ornament with gloss spray paint, strung some ribbon through the hole, and hung them on the tree!

 

I had some left over dough so I used cookie cutters to cut out some shapes and let Emma have some fun finger painting (which consisted mostly of me putting paint on her hands and letting her grab the ornaments).  I thought these would be cute little gifts for family from Emma :o)