Salt Dough: Make a Bracelet with Kids Kids Activities Blog

Salt dough is easy to make and fun to use. Here is a fun way to use salt dough to make a bracelet with your kids.

We at Kids Activities Blog hope you and your child enjoy some special creative time together with this easy DIY bracelet project.

Salt Dough

Salt dough is a simple and versatile material that you can easily make at home using just two common household staples – flour and salt. Salt dough is a wonderful cross between play dough and modelling clay. It is soft, just like play dough, and can be molded into all sorts of items like beads, pendants, Christmas decorations, plaques, bowls, cups or ornaments. The possibilities are endless. The dough creations are then baked to preserve them. Salt dough is a wonderful sensory material and this salt dough bracelet is a great fine motor skills activity from forming the beads to threading them onto the string. It would also make a special gift that kids can make for mother’s day.

Make a Bracelet

1 cup salt
2 cups plain flour
up to 1 cup warm water
food coloring
varnish (optional)
string or thread

Salt Dough Craft

Start by mixing the salt and flour in a bowl. Pour in the warm water until the mixture becomes thick. You may not need the full cup of water. Pour it in slowly until the desired consistency is achieved. It should be about the same consistency as home made play dough. At this point I separated the dough into four equal portions. I added a few drops of food coloring to three of the portions to make colored salt dough and left one portion plain white. Mix the coloring into the dough thoroughly. Knead the dough for a few minutes until it becomes smooth. To form the beads, break off a small piece of dough and roll it between the palms of your hands to form a ball. To make the marbled beads pictured above, simply take a small amount of dough from two different dough colors and roll them together.

DIY Bracelet

To make a hole in the center of each bead we used a bamboo skewer. You could also use a chopstick, the handle of a paintbrush or a pencil. When the dough is baked the hole will shrink slightly so you need to make the hole fairly large. It also helps to re-insert the skewer into the hole a few times during the baking process. The beads do not all need to be round. My son used a cookie cutter to cut some star shapes from the dough and we used one as a charm on our bracelet.

When the beads have been created, it’s time to bake them! You need to keep the oven temperature low so that they do not lose their shape. Bake at 212 F for 3 – 4 hours, until completely dry. When they are dry, remove them from the oven and allow to cool completely. The color of the beads will fade after baking. Spraying them with varnish will intensify the color again and the varnish will also strengthen the beads and give them a lovely shine. Thread the beads onto some string, cord or elastic. Tie a knot at the ends and you are done!

More Kids Activities

Salt dough is so versatile! It is easy to use to make a bracelet but we’d love to hear about other salt dough craft ideas you have discovered. For more great kids activities, take a look at these: