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. 

Santa ornaments

These ornaments might be one of my favorite crafts we've done so far.  This is kind of a mom-activity since M really didn't have much of a part except for lending his hand for tracing.  However, I bet older kids could try the painting or at least mix the dough.

This is another salt dough activity.  We used salt dough once before.  You basically need one part salt to two parts flour and then about the same amount of water as salt.  For example:
2 cups flour
1 cups salt
1 cup water*
I ad the asterisk because I usually add the water gradually based on the consistency.  For this I only used a 1/2 cup of flour to a 1/4 cup of salt.  We ended up with three ornaments.

The first step is to trace your child's hand and then cut it out.

Mix the ingredients for the salt dough then knead it until it's mixed.  Roll it out flat and use a sharp knife to cut hands using the traced handprint.  I added the holes using a plastic straw:

Let them bake at a low temperature (we baked them at the lowest temperature our oven would go which was around 200 degrees) for one hour.  I flipped ours once so they baked for 30 minutes on each side.

After they come out paint them so that the four fingers are Santa's beard and the thumb is the long part of his hat.  Add a string to hang it:

I wrote M's name and the year on the back of each.  I want to put something on them to preserve them a bit better but I haven't yet.  This is a super cute gift that doesn't cost much to make.  You could even add little tags to the string.  

mother's day handprints

On Saturday morning M and I attempted handprint keepsakes for the grandmothers, great-grandmother, and Godmother for Mother's Day.  I found the idea on Imagination Tree.  M is not big on handprints (as seen here) so it took us a few tries.  The best thing about this project was that when our handprints came out sloppy or, more often the case, not deep enough into the dough, we could just roll the dough up and start over.
To make the dough we mixed 1 cup flour, 1 cup salt, and a little less than a 1/2 cup water.  I ended up adding more flour as the first round proved the be too sticky when we pushed M's hand in.  I used a wooden skewer to make holes that I put string through once they were done baking.  We baked them for a little over 2 hours at 200 degrees on parchment paper and I flipped them about halfway through.
After about 24 hours of air drying I painted them with acrylic paint and added an acrylic clear coat on top.  We wrote "Happy Mother's Day 2012" on the back as a finishing touch.