Salt Dough Ornaments and Goodies!!

I am sure you have seen these adorable Santa ornaments floating all over Pinterest (or something like them), and I am so excited to say that ours turned out successfully!!  :)  I got the original idea from Jay over at Learning to Play and Playing to Learn!

Emma is so proud of her creations!!  :)
Even though E is only 18 months old, she was great at helping make these Santas, and also the hearts we made when we had left over dough!  :)  It was really hard to take pictures of what she was doing while she was doing it, sadly...But, she did help put on the stickers, and then she ran around in circles around my legs while I painted and Modge Podged!  LOL!!  :)  We are making these Santas and hearts for both sets of grandparents as well as Emma's uncle.  We cannot wait to see their faces when they open the Santas that are E's little hands.  :)

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

We traced E's hand, as soon as she let me, onto a piece of white paper.
*I then used this piece of paper as a tracer to trace multiple times onto the rolled out salt dough mixture.

First of all, in order to make the salt dough you need the following ingredients:

2 cups of flour

2 cups of salt

1 cup of water

We poured the dry ingredients into a big bowl and started to stir.

Then, we slowly added some water while we continued to stir.  We kept adding a little bit of water a little bit at a time until all the water was used, stirring in between pours.

We laid the hand tracer onto the rolled out dough mixture and I used a knife to cut out the handprints.

As soon as we made our three hand Santas, I realized we had extra dough, so we made some hearts, but you could make any shape you wanted!

We put the hands and hearts onto a cookie tray and into the oven they went!  Now go about your business and do something else!  Those ornaments will be in there for about 6 hours.  Make sure to flip the ornaments over halfway through so both sides get cooked.

As soon as both sides are cooked, take them out and let them cool.

Then you get to paint!



Add some flair! :)

Make sure to Mod Podge those suckers so they stay nice and crisp looking.

Here is the finished product with ribbon and all!  Now these can be hung from the Christmas tree at the grandparents' houses!

Here is the idea for our hearts.  We are going to give our parents and Emma's uncle a hanging heart so they can hang it anywhere they want:  a cabinet door, a doorknob, cubicle at work, etc.

Enjoy this special project with your little one or by yourself!  :)