Salt Dough Snowman Craft

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.