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These simple Halloween salt dough ornaments are a tactile, fun and easy Halloween craft idea for kids.
First, there is the sensory part of kneading the dough, rolling it out and then pressing the ornaments out with the Halloween-themed cookie cutters. After that, the creative part of painting and decorating them after you’ve baked them in the oven like cookies.
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My kids are crazy about Halloween. They love Halloween crafting almost as much as Christmas crafting so this year I decided to create some salt dough ornaments with them.
If you’ve never worked with salt dough before it’s just like play dough which you can bake to harden and it’s simple enough for kids to make by themselves. They will love mixing it up, rolling it and cutting little cookie cutter shapes from the dough.
Best of all it’s made from ingredients commonly found in most homes so you shouldn’t need to rush out and buy anything (except maybe cookie cutters if you don’t already have them). In this post we’ll share our recipe as well as a simple tutorial to make these spooky Halloween salt dough ornaments.
Halloween books for kids
You Will Need:
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 cup cooking salt
• 1 cup water
• Halloween cookie cutter shapes – this set is similar to ours but not exactly the same
• Cooking utensils: rolling pin, pastry mat (we use flexible cutting mats similar to this one here), baking tray, skewer
• Acrylic paints and brushes
• String for hanging
How To:
Add the flour and salt to a mixing bowl and stir in the water. Mix until it forms a dough, if it is a bit sticky you can add more flour until it has a consistency like play dough.
Roll your dough out on a pastry mat and press the cookie cutter shapes into it. Use a skewer to poke wide holes for threading string through later on. Note: Our holes shrunk a fair bit in the baking process, some turned out too closed up to thread a piece of string through so be sure to make your holes wider than you need them to be.
Place the cookie shapes on a baking tray and bake them in a pre-heated oven at a low temperature for around three hours.
Important: Baking times and temperatures can vary considerably in different ovens. Our oven is a very hot fan-forced oven and we baked ours at around 80ºc (176ºF) for three hours.
Our ornaments puffed up quite a lot in the oven just like cookies.
Once you’ve baked them you can decorate them with acrylic paints. I did the painting with the girls a week after baking.
Once the paint has dried, thread and hang your ornaments. We hung ours on a bare branch decorated with fake spider webs.
When it’s a bit closer to Halloween we might use our cookie cutters to bake some real cookies – yum!
Do your kids love making things with salt dough too?
You might also like:
• Check out these 8 Fun Halloween papercrafts for kids
• How to make a Witch’s potion
• Tie-dyed Halloween window decals
• Make a bubbling brew for pretend play
• Make some cute egg carton monster treat holders
