Salt Dough Craft an Introduction

Salt dough is a great way to model favorite fun characters, festive decorations, styling your house or even ornaments and handmade gifts. You need no special skills, tools, equipments or ingredients for this very inexpensive hobby.

It’s also a great modeling dough, similar to playdough, but the kids can make this themselves and only need adult help or supervision on the cooking or drying stage and final varnish sealing stage.

Salt Dough can be colored with food coloring, natural things such as cocoa powder, paprika, saffron but we would be using more cost effective, poster paints, acrylic or even water color paints.

Material Required

The ingredients needed to make Salt Dough Craft are very simply; flour, salt, water and paints to color the craft item. These ingredients are readily available.

• FLOUR : This should be good quality white flour. Salt dough can be made with rye flour or whole meal flour for a more rustic effect and a darker colored dough.
• SALT : This needs to be a fine grain table or cooking salt.
• WATER : Slightly tepid or lukewarm water will help to give a smoother dough as it dissolves the grains of salt a little more quickly.
• PAINTS : you can use any type of paints for decorating your dough. Watercolor paints are recommend as you can wipe off any mistakes and it is easier to clean the brushes and it is easier to clean the brushes. Acrylic paints are water based and due to it quick drying effect it is difficult to hide mistakes. Also, you can add paint while kneading the dough or can choose to painted once dry. Generally I paint them after drying this help prevent wastage of unused colored dough.
• VARNISH : The best type of varnish to use is an ordinary wood varnish, available from any hardware store. never use a water based acrylic varnish. these quickly drying verities soak into the dough and will smudge any paint you have applied.

Tools and Equipments

• Large mixing bowl.
• Brushes
• Paper clips.
• Cloves and black headed map pins.
• Baking sheets (optional)
• Modeling tools (optional)
• Hand Gloves (optional)

Dough Craft Making Process

1. First we need to prepare the dough. Take 4 Cup Flour, 2cup Salt and 2cup Water. Mix the three ingredients and knead a soft dough for making craft models. Checks that your dough is the correct consistency, so that you can start giving shape to your model.
2. Once you have kneaded your salt dough, it will be smooth and white, pliable and won’t stick to your hands or your work surface. Now decide what you are going to make, will it be a favorite cartoon character, a bowl, an intricate ornament or an item for decoration?
3. Do you need to color some of your salt dough before you model it? Salt dough can be colored at this stage if you want to use different colors to make different elements of your character or craft item.Now this can be a little messy, so you may want to use gloves. Start with a little paint, then add more, little by little, kneading into the dough as you go. If it gets too wet with paint, you can add more flour. Knead it all well.
4. Templates can be very useful in shaping the dough in the desired shape. This helps if you want to create many similar shaped designs for your craft item. You can make any sized item as long as it fits in your oven.
5. Baking and drying the object is very easy. Dough craft is dried by balking it for several hours at a lower temperature. Salt dough should be baked at temperature between 100-120 degree centigrade (200-250 degree Fahrenheit) in a fan assisted oven.
   Though some times excessive heat may burn the dough when it first goes in the oven. Long baking in a 100C oven is the best. Browning can be done at the end when the temperature should be raised to 180C but no higher. If the dough has been colored it may be better to dry in the open air and not bake at all.

   Tips: cover very exposed areas with foil to prevent over cooking and open the oven door every so often to allow moisture to escape.

6. You can also paint your salt dough character after you have made it. Once the character is dried, use your imagination to paint it with colors of your choice.
7. Allow the paint to dry. Now you can apply some Varnish to add glaze to the Salt Dough Craft item you have just created.