We made salt dough ornaments with our friends Krystal and Maya on Friday. Then they came back yesterday to paint and decorate them with us. Krystal and I had as much fun as Maia and Maya. This was one of the activities on our advent calendar and we used this tutorial.
I have to admit that we almost gave up on this during the rolling and cutting out stage. The dough was soft and sticky and hard to work with even though I'm pretty sure we followed the directions correctly. M & M gave up early on and went off to play, leaving Krystal and me to cut out almost all of our ornaments.
I feel like everyone's been using salt dough forever. Why did we have so much trouble with it?!
The big problem was that in moving a salt dough ornament onto the cookie sheet, it got misshapen. We eventually hit on the idea of rolling the dough directly onto a sheet of parchment paper, cutting our shapes with the cookie cutters, then pulling off the excess dough and leaving the ornaments in place on the parchment paper. We just slipped the parchment paper onto cookie sheets and then into the oven. It worked well! And once they baked, they were very hard and easy to work with.
The painting and decorating stage was a big hit with the girls. Very big. Primarily due to the recent purchase of GLITTER.
They took their glitter application very seriously.
And there was no such thing as excess in their eyes. How can there be too much glitter?
The ornaments were lovely, glitter and all.
And dry enough to hang just before we headed off to Maia's first ballet class.
Have you worked with salt dough? Any tips?
