Make salt dough decorations

Planning and setting up this activity

• You may want to prepare the salt dough before running the session.
• You may want to run this activity over two weeks to give time to bake and paint the salt dough.

Prepare the salt dough

1. Gather everyone in a circle and explain you’ll be making salt dough decorations to celebrate and hang up. Remind everyone taking part that the dough is not edible, so they shouldn’t put anything in their mouths, noses or ears.
2. Tell everyone that they’re going to make a salt dough decoration, sculpture or craft.
3. Mix together two parts plain flour to one part salt - table salt works well!
4. To make a plain dough, slowly add one part water until it’s the right consistency. It needs to be not too crumbly, but not too sticky.
5. To make coloured dough, cut the amount of water in half and replace with paint. Add this slowly to your dry mix of salt and flour until it reaches the correct consistency.
6. You could also add bio-degradable glitter to make the dough sparkly.

Designing 

1. Show everyone what is available for making the decorations, sculptures, models or ornaments from the salt dough. You may have different coloured doughs, biscuit cutters in various shapes or butter knives for cutting details in the designs.
2. Give out pens and paper, so people can plan and draw out their designs for their ornaments.
3. Everyone should take some dough and start to model it.
4. People can model the dough however the want to. They could make a sculpture, a pot, a hanging decoration or a table centrepiece.

Making a hanging decoration

1. If people want to make a hanging decoration, roll it out onto a floured surface until it’s around 5mm thick.
2. When the dough’s ready, they should then cut out their shape.
3. Once they’re happy with their design, use a sharp pencil or a knitting needle to carefully create a hole at the top. This hole can be used to put string, ribbon or twine through for the decoration to be hung up.
4. Be careful not to make the hole too close to the edge, as this could mean it'll break once baked.

Bake  

1. Place the finished decorations on a flat baking sheet. 
2. Bake the salt dough in an oven, set on its lowest temperature, for three hours. An adult volunteer may want to do this outside of the meeting.
3. When cooked, use heatproof gloves to remove the tray out of the oven and turn the oven off.
4. Leave the tray on a safe, heatproof and stable surface to cool down completely, away from young people.

Decorate

1. After they've cooled down, the salt dough can be painted or coloured using marker pens. You could also glue or stick craft items onto them, such as sequins, gems or stickers.
2. If you’ve made a hanging decoration, thread a ribbon or twine through the hole in the top and tie a knot. Then, choose somewhere to hang up your decoration and enjoy!