Salt Dough Ornaments

I don't get those DIY blogs that have a fancy "themed" Christmas trees every year, with new coordinating colors, or brand new ornaments. What do they do with all the ornaments they've made, collected, or been gifted? Keep them in storage? That's no fun.

That said, I was a little bummed when I saw how my these salt dough ornaments were turning out last year, once my then-2-year-old started mixing up the paint I'd laid out for him. They were turning out that olive green/brown/khaki color that happens when every paint color ever gets thrown into the mix. I remarked to my sister that we were going to have the ugliest tree ever this year thanks to these monochromatic ornaments.

We painted them on Christmas Eve last year, so once they were dry, they were packed up until we took them out again this year. But when we opened the ornament box the day after Thanksgiving, inspiration struck. Glitter saves everything.

I hit all of the painted salt dough ornaments with a couple blasts of Rustoleum "Intense Shimmery Finish" in gold, and, like magic, I all of a sudden loved these ornaments (which had started to grow on me anyway, I mean, my baby painted many of them!)

We strung them up on some butcher's twine (a.k.a. a fancy word for white and a colored strand of string twisted together) found in Target's Dollar Spot section. Thank goodness, too, because our tree would be pretty bare if it weren't for the addition of these ones. I think our theme is "sentimental."

How to Make Salt Dough Ornaments and Handprint Ornaments:
Dough ingredients:
One part water
One part salt (pretty sure you need to use iodized salt, i.e. not Kosher salt)
Two parts flour

Mix together ~10 minutes to form a soft dough. Roll out to desired thickness and use cookie cutters or butter knives to cut out shapes.

Once we got a couple of handprints of each of the kids, we cut circles around those and use rubber stamps to spell their names and the year, pressing the stamps into the dough. Then we let the 2-year-old go to town on the rest of the dough, treating it like Play-Doh. He used his Play-Doh cookie cutters, which gave us shapes of fish, flying saucers, and birds. He also pressed some of his Cars toys into the dough.

We used a straw to cut little hanger holes in the top of each ornament, then popped all of the ornaments into the oven on cookie sheets and baked them at 200* until they seemed nice and firm.

A couple of days later we painted them using acrylic craft paints. I painted the handprints solid white and filled the names in with a gold paint pen. Those ones were sealed with Modge Podge.

Then we had a painting party to paint the rest of the shapes, which didn't come back out again until this year!