We love creating with salt dough. It is so easy and we always have the ingredients on hand to make more because all you need is flour, salt, and water.
Basic Salt Dough Recipe
2 cups flour
1 cup fine salt
1/2 cup of water
Combine the flour and salt in a bowl. Add about 1/2 cup of water and knead. You will get a consistently much like Play-Doh. Sometimes you may have to add a little more water to get the dry ingredients completely incorporated. But be careful! If it gets even a little too wet then it won’t hold it’s shape as well.
We divided this batch in half so that each of my children could make a snowman. My daughter rolled hers into two balls while my son made three.
To give the look of sparkling snow, my daughter also sprinkled some shimmering white glitter on her dough balls and gently patted the glitter into the dough.
To make the snowman, stick a drinking straw in the bottom part of the snow man and then slide the other balls on the straw. This will keep the little guy all together.
Next it the really fun part. Pull together various bits of craft materials to decorate the little fella. My son was going to use little twigs for his arms but decided to use drinking straws instead. He cut slits on the end of the straw near the bendy end then trimmed the length down to size. The slits he cut look like little fingers on his hand!
They used googly eyes, little black perler beads for the charcoal eyes and mouth, orange pipe cleaner for the nose, random beads for buttons, and ribbon scraps for scarves.
They even made little snowman hats out of strips of cardstock.
Once they are decorated, just let them air dry and they will be a permanent keepsake for years to come.
I really loved letting my children do their own thing when it came to decorating their new friends.
No, we may not have the Martha Stewart version of a snowman but these are the centerpiece on our kitchen table for the next few weeks and my children couldn’t be prouder because they did it themselves.
Note: Next time I will divide the dough into four snowmen instead of just two. The snowballs are rather heavy and we noticed that the bottom ball squished out a little over time due to the weight from above. Perhaps we should have made the dough a little drier to make it firmer but I think making smaller, lighter snowmen would help a lot. Or course, my kids think these are kind of cool because it looks like they are starting to melt!
Next we are going to try making salt dough ornaments for our tree.
What are some other ways to create with salt dough? Please share your creative ideas.
I LOVE this! We are definitely going to give it a try here a my house. Thanks for sharing! 🙂
Salt dough seems to be the BIG thing this year and I seemed to have missed the boat. Is it basically playdough? Would you please share these with our readers for Fun Stuff Fridays? http://www.toysinthedryer.com/2011/12/fun-stuff-fridays-4-3-weeks-long-for.html
You are an excellent mother! I ALWAYS wanted to make dough and make stuff from them and my mother would go nuts. I’d try to make them when she wasn’t home and I always got in trouble for having flour everywhere. Then I thought I’d get smart and do it outside. Still got in trouble. And they never dried out properly so I could never decorate them. These snowmen are great!
those are absolutely precious! I think I might make them – I have a bunch of ‘regular’ salt that I won’t use (we use sea salt) and I think we’ll do this for Christmas!
I *love* the idea of snowmen. So obvious, yet we never thought of it! we made some salt dough a couple of weeks back and made cookies, waffles, hotdogs, sandwiches, and pizzas to go with Little Moos tea-set. We haven’t painted them yet, but soon…..