Salt Dough Ornaments

I decided to jump on the bandwagon and make some salt dough ornaments with the boys. I've never done it before, and knew Jacob would really enjoy it this year. Surprisingly, I was able to get Joshua to paint four ornaments, which is three more than I expected him to do.

 

I must admit, I followed one recipe I found online, and it came out like soup. Bob needed to help, since I lost my patience with the dough, and he fixed it all up so we could cut the ornaments out and get them baking. Not my finest moment, that's for sure!

We let those bake for a good four hours. The next day, I got everything ready for the boys to paint after they finished lunch. I wanted everything to be already set so we could just get started and not make them wait on me to gather things together. I found the acrylic paint on sale at Hobby Lobby for about 50 cents a bottle. We've never used acrylic paint, so I made sure to have the boys get their shirts off because I wasn't sure how hard the paint is to get out of clothes.

 

 I taped some wax paper to cookie sheets for the boys to paint on, so I didn't have to worry about where the paint ended up. I usually put down newspaper, but this ended up being much cleaner.



Joshua playing with a train at the table, saying "cheese," while he wasn't painting.

 Jacob was hard at work. He started off using other colors, but painted almost all ornaments silver once he discovered we actually had silver paint.

 Joshua's four ornaments - the plane, his "J" for our tree, a circle, and a fire truck.

 More silver ornaments!

 All of Jacob's ornaments (and my Christmas tree I did while Jacob was finishing).

 I let the ornaments dry overnight, and then used a brush-on glaze the next day to finish them off. Nice and shiny Christmas ornaments! I am very pleased with how they turned out!