homemade christmas ornaments – In These Stilettos

You may remember from last year that we made Salt Dough Christmas Ornaments. Its something we do every year and it always ties in nicely with teachers end of year gifts and homemade sentiments for family and friends.

This year I was inspired by Sugar and Paper Parties insanely gorgeous sugar cookies, I’m not one to attempt anything like the masterpieces that Liezl creates (well actually I did and they looked like a dogs breakfast), so we decided to make ornaments for the tree with our snow globe cookie cutter. (Because painting is alot easier then icing 🙂 )

Apart from putting in the oven and taking it out again, this is literally one craft the kids can do by themselves from start to finish.

The Recipe has 3 ingredients and is SUPER easy:

4 cups flour

1 cup salt

1.5 cups water

Preheat your oven to 100 degrees Celsius.
Combine all of your ingredients and knead. If your dough is too dry add a little bit more water.
Roll out the dough to a thickness of about 1.5 cm
Using a cookie cutter of your choice cut out your shapes, if you are making handprints, use a side plate to cut a circle first and then have your child place their hand on that circle.

Using a straw, make a hole in the top for where you want to hang your salt dough ornament.
Bake for about 2 hours. If your ornaments are still soft to touch, put back in for another hour. (It will depend on your thickness how long you need to bake for. The thinner ornaments will take less time but thicker may take more).
Once cooled, decorate as you wish. We used our favourite Dala paints, the acrylic works best and lots of glitter, especially at Christmas time.
Finish with a varnish.

I normally do this over 2 or 3 days. The first day we roll and make bake our ornaments, on the second we paint and on the third day I spray it with a coast of clear varnish.