We made ornaments out of salt dough, painted them, and hung them on our tree. It's a great alternative to spending a lot of money on expensive ornaments, it makes our tree our own, and it gave us some extra QT together! But let me start from the beginning...
If you've been reading my blog somewhat recently, you know that Mr. Robinson and I became husband and wife on September 10, 2011.
We started dating in February of 2011. It was quite the whirlwind romance and I would not have it any other way. You can read all of the mushy-gushy details by clicking here.
One thing that is a little odd about our story is that this Christmas is our very Christmas together. Not just our first Christmas as a married couple, but our first first Christmas together in general, overall, period. Isn't that crazy?! We are married and have never really spent a Christmas together.
So we've been going out of our way to make this Christmas extra special. We thought of going to a ceramics shop and making or painting Christmas ornaments together for our tree. Well, we work all the time and stay so busy that it would have been hard to take an entire day and devote it to driving almost 2 hours to go paint pottery. In addition, money has been a little tight. Thank goodness for Pinterest! I found the idea about making ornaments out of salt dough. I had pictures of the beginning steps but I seem to have lost them. Oh, bother. I'm very sorry.
I somehow talked my husband into helping me - but he ended up really enjoying himself!
Our original plan was to make salt-dough gift tags for all of the people we planned on giving Christmas gifts to. But we loved them so much, we are calling them Christmas ornaments and keeping them for our tree. :)
We made two batches of dough so that we'd both have something to work with and to make sure we had plenty of gift tags ornaments.
One cup of flour.
One cup of warm water.
One cup of salt.
Easy enough. :)
Mix all of the ingredients together with your hands. (A spoon will just get stuck. We tried.)
The recipe we were following said to use a rolling pin to make the dough smooth. But we could not get the rolling pin to do anything other than ruin the salt dough and pull it all apart. So, we smooshed it flat with our hands.
Then, using cookie cutters we cut out a few shapes. That was a lot of hard work and made a mess and was not producing very nice shapes. It works much better it you make shapes with your hands. :)
Place the shapes onto a baking sheet and bake at 250 degrees F for about 2 hours. We ended up baking ours for 2 and a half to make sure they were really crispy. We wanted them to be sturdy and not mushy at all. They turned out great. Here are all of the different shapes before we painted them.
We let them dry for a few days. I didn't want to mess them up, and I'd never played around the salt dough before. Finally, we pulled out the paint and had a ball decorating our gift tags turned ornaments. It wasn't until after we painted them that we decided to keep them as ornaments.
Mr. Robinson painted the 6 on the left and I painted the seven on the right.
His
-Orange & Black striped heart
-Star-shaped spirally thing
-Red "K" for me and a green "V" for him
-Christmas tree
-striped ornament
-breast cancer ribbon :)
My aunt passed away a few years ago from BC and it's a very close to my heart cause.
I painted the others.
Here are some close up pictures! :)
So, maybe I'm a little partial but I think they turned out GREAT! Last night I tied some twine through the holes and we hung them on the tree together. :) I hope that they hold up and last a life time. I plan on wrapping them up nice and tight, and being very careful about how I store them between Christmases. One day, they'll make great heirlooms if we can keep them from breaking or cracking. I'm not really sure how well salt dough holds up. In any event, we made some great memories making them together. :) Even if the ornaments don't last, the memories will.
What do you think?
Have you made ornaments, or anything else, out of salt dough?
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