Easy Leaf Ornament Salt Dough Craft for Your Christmas Tree

Today we have a fun salt dough homemade Christmas ornament that kids of all ages can make. Homemade Christmas ornaments are always my favorite to unpack each year as we set up the Christmas tree.

We love to play with play doh, and our salt dough craft 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.

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Salt Dough CHristmas Ornament Craft

This is a salt dough, no-bake clay craft that would make a wonderful gift for the office, a teacher, or your home using things found in nature.

Related: Go on a nature scavenger hunt

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.

Supplies Needed

For Salt Dough Recipe

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

For Ornament Craft

• Paint
• Varnish
• Leaves – or you can use these leaf coloring pages as a template
• Butter knife
• Rolling pin
• Wax paper

Instructions

Step 1

Make the salt dough recipe by combining salt and flour together in a large bowl and then adding water a little at a time until it is the right consistency and forms a dough ball.

Step 2

Lay out wax paper over your work area.

Step 3

Using your rolling pin flatten clay until your salt dough is 1/2 inch thick or so.

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

Step 4

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

Step 5

Using a butter knife, cut out the leaf pattern.

Step 6

Carefully peel off the leaf and place leaf clay over a rounded coffee cup so that it dries with an oval shape inside. If you prefer you can also dry it flat and it will work just fine.

Step 7

Set it out to dry in a warm spot overnight or if you don’t have a lot of time, you can bake the salt dough at 275 until solid.

Step 8

Paint using acrylic paint. Once the paint dries you can use varnish to give it a glossy look.

Variations on this Salt Dough Craft

Our boys enjoyed playing with the dough/clay and rubbing things on to it so much. Next time, 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.

More Salt Dough Ornaments You Can Make for Christmas

• Make a handprint ornament out of salt dough for your tree.
• Another favorite salt dough Christmas ornament is our Nativity handprint ornament.
• Christmas dough crafts make ornaments have never been more fun!
• This salt dough diffuser ornament gives your fake tree Christmas tree scent!
• Make a salt dough snowman!

MORE HOMEMADE CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS FROM KIDS ACTIVITIES BLOG

• If you loved this DIY salt dough ornament, then you definitely won’t want to miss this awesome list of Christmas ornaments kids can make!
• We have over 100 Christmas crafts kids can make.
• Homemade ornaments have never been easier…clear ornament ideas!
• Turn kids artwork into ornaments to give or decorate for the holidays.
• Popsicle stick ornaments have never been more fun!
• Pipe cleaner Christmas crafts turn into ornaments to hang on the Christmas tree.
• One of our favorite painted Christmas ornaments starts with clear glass ornaments.

How did your salt dough Christmas ornaments turn out? Do they look like leaves hanging on your Christmas tree?