When I was in primary school my mom sent me to craft classes. We used to make all sorts of things, from decoupage and paper-mache to experimenting with salt dough. Most of my salt dough creations came out looking a bit weird (to put it mildly) and probably ended up in the bin. So, you can just imagine my surprise when I saw a new salt dough trend on Pinterest, tried it myself and it turned out pretty beautiful!

Let me start by explaining what salt dough is. It’s a combination of salt, flour and water, that you knead into a dough. This can be coloured (with food colouring), painted or used as is. After making your decorations you can either bake them in the oven or leave outside to dry. They become rock hard and last forever!
The decorations I’m explaining today are extremely easy to make- it’s basically foolproof. It’s as simple as rolling out the dough, decorating it with rubber stamps and pressing them in forms using cookie cutters. After drying you can use them as tags on gifts, decorating your Christmas tree, serviette tags and so much more. The possibilities are endless. 

Salt Dough Decorations

You will need:

•  1 cup salt (The finer the salt you use, the finer the grain of the ornaments)
•  2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup water
• rolling pin
• cookie cutters
• rubber stamps
• ink pad
• a straw

Instructions:
1.  Mix all the flour, salt and water  together to form the dough. Knead it for a few minutes, make sure everything is combined.
2.  Next you roll out the dough to about 1 cm, using the rolling pin. Don’t make it to thin, otherwise your tags might break or look a little flimsy. 
3.  Now for the fun part. Start decorating the dough using rubber stamps and different colour ink. Remember you can use “blank” stamps to create a blind embossing effect. 
4. Next you can start pressing shapes out of the dough. Use the straw to make a little hole at the top. 
5. When finished you can lay them out on a wire rack to dry. If you’re having warm weather they’ll take about 3 days to air dry,  but in cooler and more humid temperature they might take up to 6 days.
6. You can also dry them in an oven at 100 – 120°C for at least 3 hours. 

Have fun!!