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A few weeks ago we made a beautiful floral salt dough craft and I received so many messages on Instagram about it that I decided to share the directions here. My little girl is three and loves crafts and art so we spend a lot of our time making things. This turns into piles of drawings of smiling faces and zig-zags, watercolor paintings hanging on the fridge, and salt dough crafts stuffed away (or out on a random shelf). When I’m able to combine a craft time with a gift to send to Grandparents that’s a plus for everyone.
We live far from family and with the current travel restrictions we haven’t been able to visit with them as we normally would. So my girl asked if we could make some thing to send to them (win). She had some parameters:
- Must be a heart, “because a heart means, I love you” (seriously so cute, I know she’s mine… but come on)
- It must have flowers
floral salt dough craft
Her rules made me so excited. I had recently seen a Insta friend make a salt dough craft with flowers and I knew we could do something similar! This activity took a few days for us, which was wonderful, because it took up some time (quarantine life, right?). The first day we went outside and picked flowers on our yard during the baby’s nap time.
The next day we made our salt dough (a great activity if you’re want to work on counting/measuring) and we cut out hearts with a cookie cutter and added little flowers before baking them in the oven (I’ll include the recipe below ). A few days went by (life) and we used Mod Podge to seal the hearts.
our floral salt dough craft before going into the oven
Just by chance we finished these right before Mother’s Day so they were a gift for Mother’s Day for their Grandmas from the girls. You could use things other than flowers too; but be careful if you’re using the oven to bake them and add anything not oven safe after they bake.
I loved this sweet little salt dough craft and would probably make it even without her… I’ve been thinking about making some and adding some gold leaf paint…
Let me know if you have any questions and have fun making your own salt dough craft!
What do you do with all your excess crafts laying around? Let me know!
Floral Salt Dough Recipe:
Ingredients:
1 Cup of Salt
2 Cups of All Purpose Flour
1 Cup of Warm Water
Small fresh wild flowers (we just picked from our yard)
Supplies used:
Paint Brush
Directions:
- Mix Salt and flour in a large bowl
- Slowly stir in water. Mix well either with a spatula or hands until a dough is formed.
- Form a ball with the dough and kneed the dough. The dough will become smoother the longer you kneed it.
- Take flowers and place between pieces of parchment paper. Roll over parchment with rolling pin until flowers are flat but not smooshed
- Use cookie cutters to create different shapes in your salt dough
- To add flowers you have two choices:
- press flowers into dough before baking
- add flowers after dough has been baked
- Bake dough at 200 F until it is dry (about 2 hours)
- Allow your creations to cool and seal with Mod Podge. If you left the flowers off during baking add on the flowers before sealing and paint the Mod Podge all over the salt dough cut out. I did two coats, allowing the first coat to dry before applying the second. Make sure to also seal the backside of your salt dough cutout with Mod Podge!
Store dough in an air tight container if you do not plan on using it right away.
