Play and Learn Every Day

crafts

Top Ten Thanksgiving Table Decoration Crafts

13:00

4 years old

Maya the Bee Movie - Review and Competition

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1 year old

Cinnamon Salt Dough

07:30

I have made a very exciting discovery, a lovely smelling and warm feeling discovery for fantastic creations and keepsakes that I can't wait to share! I wanted to make some autumnal salt dough creations with the kids the other day, and I was getting out the ingredients for our regular salt dough recipe when I thought that I just wanted to add a little something extra. I wanted it to have a nice colour so we wouldn't necessarily have to paint our creations, and for an extra bonus I wanted it to smell autumnal, to smell like pumpkin pie and hot apple cider and other yummy treats. So I wondered if I just added a bit of cinnamon to our salt dough recipe if it would work, and it did!

Ingredients:

1 cup flour
1 cup salt
1/2 cup water
2 teaspoons cinnamon

We mixed all of the ingredients, the great thing about salt dough is that you can't really get it wrong, you can always add a bit more water or flour if the consistency doesn't feel quite right. A lot of times we end up with a lot on the floor so we need to add a bit extra! Once it was all mixed together we gave it a good squish and rolled it around a lot to make it nice and soft to use.

Then we rolled it out nice and flat ready to use in lots of different ways. As it's autumn I gave them a selection of different types of leaves that we had collected on an earlier walk (that I had washed) and some leaf shaped cookie cutters. I let them play for quite some time with salt dough, just like it's play dough, before making our final creations that we'll dry and save.

I wasn't sure how well the leaf printing would work, and that's one reason that I wanted a salt dough that wouldn't need to be painted. I didn't want the paint to fill in the fine lines of the leaf prints. They looked absolutely beautiful when the kids printed them, so perfect and delicate like the real leaves. The kids loved seeing the leaf shapes appear in their dough creations.

We decided after a few experiments that the most effective technique would be to use a leaf shaped cookie cutter first, and then use the leaf to make the print after. This made the most lasting print effect and looked most like a leaf when we finished.

Of course we couldn't help but do a few hand prints in our salt dough as well, we can never have too many! I use a straw to make a hole in the top of each one so that I can hand them up when they are finished. I then put them on baking paper on a tray in the oven at a very low temperature for a couple of hours, the smell from the oven was lovely! Then I leave them out overnight to dry out further.

They turned out incredibly well! They don't need any painting or further decoration at all, they look fantastic and you can see every little detail. They still smell of cinnamon and will make lovely keepsakes for years to come.