How To Make Easy Easter Salt Dough Decorations

April 15, 2014

How To Make Easy Easter Salt Dough Decorations

Want to make really easy Easter salt dough decorations? Here’s a simple recipe to make salt dough, which is great for kids to follow and help decorate, too.


Making Easter salt dough decorations

Making Easter Decorations

Shh! Eliza and I have been on a top secret Easter making-mission this weekend – Grandmas, look away now – crafting up some salt dough bunnies and Easter decorations.

We’re spending the long weekend up with relatives in Sheffield, so wanted to do make something with an Easter theme we could give to everyone (and post it down to my mum and dad too).

I thought it would be fun for us both to do something a bit different that was likely to hold Eliza’s interest for longer than about thirty seconds, and knew she’d love the all the messy stages of salt dough (making the dough, kneading, painting – and most of all, getting flour everywhere).

We inherited a set of shape cutters my mum kept from when we were younger. There’s a set of Mr Men as well as animals and various shapes. There was also a bunny from my own childhood that has been used to make rabbity-shapes for over 30 years.

Easter bunny shape cutters So I decided that we were going to make some painted salt dough hanging shapes with an Easter theme (bunnies, eggs, and, erm jewels?) Growing up, we always had a festive Easter tree, and thought even if people didn’t have one they could hang them in their kitchen.

Making the Easter bunnies (and a salt dough recipe)

We used the usual salt dough recipe of half half whole (half a cup of salt – normal table stuff, half a cup of water, whole cup of flour).

For the salt dough decorations, you will need:

  • Half a cup of table salt
  • Half a cup of water
  • A whole cup of flour
  • Shape cutters
  • Paint to decorate

How to make salt dough

To make the salt dough decorations:

  • Mix the salt and flour together first
  • Gradually added the water.
  • It may take a bit of experimenting to get the right consistency; if so, add more water, more flour, and so on.
  • Once we had a ball of dough, we rolled it out into a flat pancake. A rolling pin would be ideal for this – who’d have thought? – but we seem to have lots ours in the move.  So used a drinking beaker instead.
  • Then we used the cutters to cut out some of the shapes. Eliza liked pressing the cutter down initially, but – as predicted – lost interest and much preferred to freestyle with her own lump of dough making ‘cupcakes’.
  • The shapes were put on baking paper and baked on a plate in the microwave for about five minutes on and off. I did have to take them out every 20 seconds or so to flatten as using the microwave means they have a tendency to bubble – but they came out fine in the end.

Once they were cool, I got my mini Picasso to get to work with some paint.

How To Decorate Salt Dough Decorations

We used children’s poster paint, although acrylic paint would work really well.

We added a first coat, which was yellow…

Salt dough decorations

And then we added a second coat of gold to the Easter salt dough decorations, and added glitter. But you can decorate them however you like!

We’ve also hung ours on coloured embroidery thread loops.

How to make really easy  Easter salt dough decorations - perfect easy craft to do with toddlers and small children

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