Rainy Day Craft - Salt Dough Creations

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So it was a rainy day here in Chicago a couple of days ago, we'd had a lovely play date in the morning but I was wondering what to do with the girls in the afternoon, so a quick look in my Crafty Kids Ideas board and salt dough it was - I followed this recipe but halved the ingredients.

I used my KitchenAid mixer to do all the hard work for me and off we went to create, and it was fun, really good fun, I explained to the girls they could make ornaments for our Christmas tree, coasters to put drinks on, jewellery, they could even use the letter cutters to do their own names or whatever they wanted to do. We'd make & bake them, but paint them the next day (as I didn't have any acrylic paints).

And the girls got busy, we had stars, dinosaurs, trees, people all sorts of things were being made, Tilly really enjoyed the cutting out and rolling, she made lots of items.

Ruby did less items but more precise - the difference between a 3 & 5 year old.

Even I had a play can you spot mine....but the girls were reluctant to give up any more dough for me so next time I will make the full amount, the girls still managed to make quite a few things and here is what we came up with ta da.....

Into the oven they went at 300f for about 20 mins - thicker pieces need longer (you can also air dry the salt dough takes about 2 days to dry out completely).  We let them cool down overnight and a quick trip to Michael's the following morning to get some acrylic paints and varnish, we had fun painting them all.

 I bought a box of 16 paints and they had great colours in for the girls to paint with, the pots are only small but a great intro into acrylic paints for us as we've never used them before but we do like them

This craft kept the girls busy for ages and ages and again you can see the difference between Tilly at 3 painting and Ruby, Tilly is more slap it on in whatever colour she likes, but Ruby is more precise and careful with her colour choices, it was fun watching and helping them, not that they needed much help.

After we let the pieces dry completely we gave them a quick varnish and voila here are our finished results

I'm particularly liking Ruby's rainbow snake and Tilly's purple angel.

This is a great craft activity for all ages of kids.