Salt dough tree decorations for Christmas

This month, appropriately enough, the theme for my Bostik Bloggers craft box was Christmas. I've been meaning to make some salt dough tree decorations for a while now, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to give them a go. They are simple to make even for very little ones, and make lovely ornaments for your own tree, or to give to friends and relatives to treasure over the years.

You need:

Flour, salt and water to make the salt dough
Festive cookie cutters and a straw
Paint in a variety of colours
Glitter glue and other sparkly embellisments
Twine, ribbon or sparkly pipe cleaners to hang

Instructions:

First you need to make your salt dough. Mix together two parts flour, one part salt and one part water, adding the water gradually until you have a firm dough. I used a cup as a measure and it made enough for about 18 decorations. Roll out the dough to a thickness of around half a centimetre, and cut into shapes. Use a straw to make a hole in the top of each shape. Harry also added some details to his decorations with a cocktail stick.

To dry I baked it in the oven at 100C for about half an hour, until the shapes were firm to touch, then I finished them off by leaving them on top of a radiator for a few days, if you need them to be finished sooner then you can leave them in the oven for longer but keep an eye on them so that they don't burn.

When dry the ornaments can be painted and decorated. Children's ready mix poster paint works well for painting salt dough, but we did use some acrylic paint, especially for the white, as it covers better and gives a stronger colour.

We waited until the next day to make sure that the paint was completely dry, then we decorated the salt dough ornaments with some Bostik glitter pens. The glitter pens can be used to make dots or by squeezing our a larger amount you can then spread the glue with a paintbrush and it dries to a lovely, sparkly, shiny finish.

Finally each one was threaded with a length of red and white stripy twine, making sure to use a generous amount, and they were ready to be hung on the tree.

The box of craft materials was provided to me free of charge by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club.