{For the Holidays} Salt Dough Craft

We love to play with play doh, and salt dough is another great medium for play and creation. Salt dough is an easy way to create homemade play doh with ingredients you already have in the kitchen during the holidays. If you have been a reader for awhile here at Kids Activities Blog, you know how CRAZY we are about dough activities of all kinds!

Holiday Craft

There’s something about the holidays that makes me bring out the clay or salt dough for some fun crafting. There are so many wonderful things to make with no-bake clay, the common craft is ornaments. But today I am going to share a different type of no-bake clay craft with you that would make a w0nderful gift for the office, a teacher or your home.

Seriously, I was amazed at how all of the leaf veins transferred over to the clay. It’s what I admired most about this craft, how natural it looked. My boys were also amazed and wanted to press all of the leaves. Have extra clay set out so they can have fun with it.

Craft with Salt Dough

Make a batch of salt dough (or use Air Dry Clay)
Paint
Varnish
Leaves
Butter knife
Rolling pin
Wax paper

1. Lay out wax paper over your work area.

2. Depending on how thick you want your leaf platters to be that is how much clay you will need to roll out.

3. Using your rolling pin flatten clay.

4. Press your leaf into the clay. The more you press the more of the veins show up on the clay.

5. Take your butter knife and cut it out.

6. Once you have your leaf pattern on your clay, carefully peel off the leaf.

7. Place leaf clay over a rounded coffee cup so that it dries with an oval shape inside to create a platter feel to it. If you prefer you can also dry it flat and it will work just fine.

8. Set it out to dry and then paint using acrylics. Once the paint dries you can use varnish to give it a glossy look.

Recipe for Salt Dough:

1 cup of salt
1/2 of flour
1/4 cup of water, adding 1 tablespoon at a time until it’s smooth.

Our boys enjoyed playing with the dough/clay and rubbing things on to it so much. I would suggest to have extra clay at hand where they can experiment with “stamping” objects to the clay. This would be a great activity to go along with your Fall hike and get them to explore textures and designs on the different things they collected.

Bake the Salt Dough at 275 until solid – with air dry clay, place in a warm spot.