salt dough beads

Last week we made some salt dough to play with then made a few items to bake in the oven and keep. 

I know I've posted about salt dough before but the recipe I use is:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1/2 cup water

Although I always end up using a bit more water than that. I've been meaning to make some large beads for a while. In fact, Santa almost brought a set of wooden ones but then went with something else. 

Anyway, we made five round salt dough balls, painted them, and added a clear coating. 

Yesterday M got to stringing. One thing to keep in mind, make the holes larger than you think you need. Our holes definitely closed up a bit in the oven. It's a lot easier to make them bigger pre-cooking than post-cooking, as I was attempting to do. We used yarn to string them. 

We will try it again. As it ended up, M liked this but I had to help him because the holes were too small. If they had been the right size he could have easily done this one independently. 

farm crayon party favors

M turned two this week and we celebrated with a farm-themed party.  I shared a lot of our party decorations from M's first birthday party but I didn't do too many decorations this year.  I did want to share our favor.  We gave M's little friends farm-shaped crayons.  I've seen these done on both Pinterest and Facebook in a variety of shapes and they were pretty easy to make.

I started by ordering the farm-shaped candy mold that included figures of a cow, sheep, horse, and tractor.  I found ours on ebay for under $2.  M had a wide variety of broken crayons so we collected all of them up, took off the wrappers, and broke them into smaller pieces.  I used a sharp knife to cut them small, which isn't completely necessary, but they melt faster.

M liked helping by filling the candy mold with the pieces.  He was more involved than I expected him to be, which was nice.  We filled each mold then baked them at 200 degrees for about 15-20 minutes each.  I'm guessing on the time because I really just kept an eye on them until they were completely melted.  Our candy mold was made of thin plastic (on the cheap side) and it warped after 3 or 4 batches so I would probably turn the oven down to 150 next time if I was using a similar mold.  I have seen some nicer ones that can probably stand the higher heat though.

When they were melted we stuck the whole tray (on a cookie sheet for easier moving) into the fridge to cool.  After about 10 minutes they popped right out of the mold.  The tractors were a little tricky because they had a thin middle section and kept breaking.  We had to overload them with crayon pieces to get them to work.

We got small cellophane favor bags, put a few in each, and attached a "made by M" tag.  M got a set of extras (and rejects) that seem to have held up pretty well.  I've found that he hasn't broken any by coloring with them but some haven't stood up to him throwing or dropping them.  We have a few headless cows around the house.  

I really liked this idea.  I found through searching that candy molds come in a wide variety of shapes (who knew?) so you could potentially make these for almost any occasion.