Salt dough ornaments - rainbow glitter style

(Aka lovely homemade presents)

When I first saw this post I knew we would have to try it. I love rainbow activities. I think it's the mix of vibrant colours. Post anything rainbow-related and that's it, I'm suckered in :)

I wanted to make some nice homemade Christmas decorations with Doof - both for our tree and also as presents for his nursery teachers. This was our first foray into the world of salt dough but I'm really pleased with the results. I've blogged before about my love of food colouring gels and they came into their own again in this activity.

Recipe:

2 cups flour

1 cup salt

3/4-1 cup warm water

Glitter

Gel food colourings 

Follow D step-by-step:

Measure out a cup of salt

Add to flour

Mix in glitter

Add the water and mix to a dough

Divide into 6 portions and add the colour gels

Pose proudly with your coloured balls

Play with them a bit :)

Then start making shapes!

Rainbow-tastic

The last step I did (so no photo, lol) - if you want to hang them as ornaments then poke a hole in the desired place with a skewer or thin straw. Make sure you turn them over and skewer from both sides so to be sure the hole has gone all the way through.

So voila - all our masterpieces:

Before baking

We then baked them in the oven on "low" (can't give you an exact temperature as all the numbers have worn off the dial but it was warm/hot rather than hot/hot!) for about 4 hours til they felt hard. I turned them over every hour or so and "re-skewered" the holes. Then I left them for another 2 days to make sure they were fully dried out.

After baking

After this some of the colours had faded slightly and I was a bit worried they weren't going to look good. Someone suggested coating them in PVA glue to protect them and brighten up the colours, but that did not work well (luckily I only tried it on one!). The glue went all gloopy and boobly on the surface so that idea was quickly shelved. So instead I bought some see-through glaze which is pretty multi-purpose and we can use in future crafting too :)

Subsequently I have been told that if you use "professional" PVA rather than kid's craft stuff then it works better. Another thing that was suggested to me was acrylic wax - but when I tried to buy some in our local art shop the owner was so snotty and off-putting at me wanting to buy some for a child's project that she put me off! Maybe next time...

And the final step - thread them on some festive silver string and hang them on the Christmas tree :)

A selection of our creations

One finished star garland

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This is the second of my "Christmas countdown" posts - you can read the first one about our Christmas traditions here. And over the next few weeks I'll be posting more :)

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