This easy salt dough lends itself to many kids crafts and projects. You can even make Christmas salt dough ornaments for your tree or to give as gifts!
Mijka and I have been doing plenty of crafty things, since she loves play doh and painting – show me a 2 year old who doesn’t – I’ve decided to put her new-found skills and passion to use in making some gifts for the preschool teachers this year.
Easy Salt Dough Recipe
First, we made the simple flour and salt dough using the recipe below. It’s super easy and has the consistency of play doh. It’s great for little kids and non-toxic. You can add food colouring to it but I find the white dough cleaner to work with. Food colouring can make it stain surfaces. Plus, you get to paint the salt dough ornaments once dry so it extends the fun.
As you can see, Mijka loved the whole process!
After kneading the dough, we got rolling and cutting out shapes! We left the shapes to dry out for a few days – see tip 4 below on how to speed up the process – then we got painting using acrylic paints and sprinkled the lot with glitter!
You can use the salt dough to make pretend cookies outside of Christmas. For edible gingerbread cookies check out my post here.
Whilst I’m not sure if all teachers keep all kids gifts all the time – that would make quite a collection – this is a fantastic way to get creative with your toddler, watch them develop or show off their skills and spend some good quality time together!
It’s great for older kids, too!
Here are a few tips for making flour and salt dough and shapes:
- You can divide the amount of dough into 4 balls and add a few drops of food coloring to each. We left ours plain as the plan was to paint the dried ornaments later.
- Keep any unused dough in a zip lock bag to prevent it from drying out and use it over a week.
- To make ornaments, don’t forget to make a little hole for the string. I’ve found a drinking straw works great for this – if using stainless steel just blow out the straw every time you make a hole.
- Dry out in a 75C oven for 2 hours or so.Turn the ornaments over a few times during the process.
Flour and Salt Dough / Play Doh
Ingredients
- 200 g plain flour
- 200 g table salt
- 1/2 cup tap water
Instructions
- Place all ingredients in a bowl and mix well until a dough forms. It should not be too dry or wet. Knead for 5 minutes or until the dough resembles play doh in consistency.
- Roll out to about 4mm thick and cut out shapes using cookie cutters. To make the hole for hanging the decorations, use a straw.
- You can leave the decorations out to dry for 2 days or to speed up the process place them on a baking sheet lined with baking paper and dry out in an oven set to 75C for 1-2 hours, turning each over a few times during the process.
- Decorate with acrylic paint and glitter.
