on the cheap: salt dough ornaments!

if there were ever a truly quick & easy & fun christmas idea to share [not to mention insanely cheap], it would definitely be this one! salt dough is probably as old as the hills, but i have to credit one of my favorite crafty-momma sites, prudent baby, for bringing it up to date with this amazing tutorial!

this seriously couldn't be easier [& the tutorial explains it perfectly & gives lots of ideas!]

you will need:

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup table salt

1/2 cup water

& that's it! just mix it up in a mixer until it makes cookie-dough consistency dough, smush it up, roll it out, & use cookie cutters on it like you would normal cookies. i have a sad lack of cookie cutters around my house so i used some of my daughter's plastic play ones from her play kitchen... what could be happier than making cute ornaments with pink plastic cookie cutters?

i did bells and stars and attempted a little toddler handprint one [i made a clay footprint ornament from the year she was born & was barely a month old at christmas & it's so precious to me now- her hand is already bigger than her newborn foot was!]. i was thinking it would be cute to put kenna's thumbprint in the little stars for the grandparents. they look like cookies but i'm sure would taste completely disgusting:

then you just pop them in the oven at 200 for 4-6 hours or overnight until they're dry [halfway through i flipped mine over]. then the fun part... paint or glitter however you like!

now, allow me to assure you that the "quick & easy" part ends here if you are, like me, completely a perfectionist & especially prone at the moment to angry pregnant hormonal breakdowns if you flick the brush wrong you mess up 30 minutes of detailed painting work. only the star turned out somewhat well, although the gold i added looks more like smeary paint than the light wash of shimmer i had hoped.
instead of throwing them in the trash & walking away [as i wanted to do last night] i picked up some cheap glitter glue and red glitter today to try to salvage them. this one looks a bit like an iced cookie when covered in glitter glue:
and the rest of the bells i just painted white and outlined in glitter glue and then glitter. not what i was originally going for, but not a complete craft fail thank goodness!
[ps- someday it will not become night time every day at 4 pm and i will be able to attempt decent pictures again. i hope you will still be reading this blog and will not have totally given up on me when that day finally comes.]