Salt Dough - not just for Christmas

Suffering from exhaustion today* and needing to opt for a day in I decided it would be good to do some simple crafty activities with G.
After breakfast we finished off one of her birthday presents - a glitter by numbers if you can call it that. Like sand art where you peel off paper with numbers on which correspond to a certain colour of glitter. The underlying surface is adhesive allowing the glitter to stick and create the picture.

That didn't take long as we'd already done the majority so I needed something else entertaining but simple so opted for doing some salt dough.

Mixing with uncle Matt

The first time I ever made salt dough with G was the festive season. I made a batch to make Christmas decorations with before her second Christmas when she was just 16 months.
She had great fun getting stuck in!





We made it a family thing and my brother, sister and niece came round and all made some salt dough and cut it into festive shapes. I pre coloured some of our dough and a couple of days later we painted them together. G had fun splodging the paint on and I finished the uncovered areas and we added extra decorations of glitter, decorative balls (again from my cake decorating supplies) and baby pasta left over from a sensory session. I added the glue on some of them as you can tell and let G then sprinkle (read chuck) the glitter on.

Most people would probably only think to do it at Christmas time but there's really no reason why you can't do it anytime of year.











I've made it a with her a couple more times since then and with being older she was able to sit and decorate them by herself.
If painting though I would recommend not using watery paints as it can make the shapes soggy and result in all the hard (but fun) work being chucked in the bin!











Today we used some of mummy's special gel colours that I normally use for cake decorating.

Here is the recipe that we followed:

225g Plain flour
250g Salt
100ml Water

 Gel colour of choice (optional)

I've given the measurements in grams as unlike the majority of baking lovers I don't have cup measurements and it annoys me I can never find recipes for these kind of things in grams! So for anyone else who has that awful dilemma ha, I hope this helps.




Only a very small amount of the gel colours are needed as they are very strong. We added them to the water before it was added to the rest of the mixture.
You can also use liquid food colouring if you prefer but you'll need a lot more and the colours won't come out as strong.


You can use whatever cutters you like. This time we used a mixture of G's playdoh cutters, some cookie cutters, one of my sugar craft plunge cutters and we also just rolled up shapes by hand.
When finished with the fun part we placed all the shapes onto a baking tray and baked for 2 -3 hours at 100oc.

Here is the batch we made today, we've yet to decorate them.

When baked and fully cooled down you can decorate however you/your children like or just leave plain and thread wool/ribbon/thread through pre-made holes and use where ever you see fit.
We like to paint ours and add bits and bobs as shown above. It's a fun crafty activity and can also be a thoughtful and cheap option for a gift or you could perhaps use them for gift tags.


What would you and your children create with salt dough?

*written on 29/09/2014