I’ve continued to do our monthly toddler crafts with my local Baby Bootcamp franchise (past projects here) but I have been terrible about blogging and sharing them. But this month’s salt dough ornaments are so cute I just had to share!! I thought it would be fun for each kid to make a keepsake item for their family or to give as a gift this season and decided salt dough ornaments was the perfect idea. Salt dough is easy to make; it’s just a 2 to 1 to 1 ratio of flour to salt to warm water. You mix all the ingredients until a dough is formed and then roll out and cut into shapes as you would cookies. (Official recipe: 2C flour, 1C salt, 1C warm water. Whisk flour and salt. Add water slowly while mixing. Kneed dough for 10 minutes).

You can use cookie cutters or free hand shapes – we shaped letters by rolling the dough into a snake shape and molding into letters. It’s also a cute idea to create a flat ball and get a hand or footprint of your child too. Note – if your end result is an ornament you’ll want to use a straw to make a hole in it at this point too to string and hang later.

Once your shapes are created you want to bake the dough low and slow (low oven temp, long cook time). For this dough that was about 1/8″ thick it was about an hour and a half of baking at 200 degrees. You don’t want to make the oven any hotter or the dough will brown.

Once out of the oven and cooled it’s time to decorate! You can draw with marker or get really into it (as we did here) and use acrylic paint and glue with sparkles. Be creative! These are great as gifts to grandparents but also as a gift tag on a present for someone like a teacher or friend.

Once paint and/or glitter has dried, seal with spray clear acrylic sealer. Salt dough ornaments are the perfect afternoon activity for your toddler or preschooler to keep them busy during these over-excited weeks leading up to Christmas!