Baby News & Salt Dough Ornaments

I've been kind of avoiding posting anything for a while because Michael and I had not announced our baby news on Facebook yet and it was getting really difficult to not say anything on here about it. I think everyone who reads this already knows, but....

WE'RE EXPECTING!

I've been writing short (okay... some are on the longer side) blogs every week since I've found out, just so I could write my feelings and memories down while they were fresh. As you probably noticed, I haven't been posting them, so I'll try to post them one-by-one now and then eventually I'll be caught up to my current week. I'll throw in some normal non-pregnancy posts every now and then for variety.

At my house this year, Christmas is going to last almost two months. :) I had all of my Christmas decorations up and the tree decorated the day after Thanksgiving and well, I'm waiting for a certain someone to help me take them down. I'll have another post so you can see my little tree and decorations, you'll just get some teasers in this post.

I decided I wanted to try to make salt dough ornaments after seeing them here. Her ornaments turned out just lovely and perfect, but when I followed her directions I got nothing short of a disaster. Instead of a dough, I made a soupy, gooey, sticky MESS. So, I turned to a Google search for tips. Most recipes I found were the same proportions that she used: 1 cup salt, 1 cup water, 2 cups flour. Go ahead, and try it, maybe you'll get better luck than I did, but that was way too much water. This is what worked for me:

1. Mix 1 cup salt and 2 cups flour and then I added this to the bowl of my KitchenAid mixer.
2. While mixing at the lowest speed I      s  l  o  w  l  y    added significantly less than 1 cup of water. I simply added water until it was the consistency of play dough. If you accidentally get a little water-pouring happy, you can add a little flour at the end.
3. I let the mixer do most of the kneading, and then I only kneaded it by hand for a few minutes until it was nice and smooth.

I separated it into three ziplock bags and let it rest for about 20 minutes before I worked with it. I don't know it this step it crucial. However, do keep it in an airtight container until you use it. If it sits out too long, it'll crack when you're trying to work with it.

Then I rolled it out and used cookie cutters  to cut out the shapes of my ornament. You need to "bake" them at 200 degrees for 4-6 hours to dry them out. It was late at night by the time they were done, so I just turn the oven off and let them sit in the oven until I decorated them the next day.

They look like sugar cookie ornaments when they're ready to decorate!

 

I used a plastic straw to cut out the holes for ribbon before drying them. 

You need to completely coat them in acrylic paint and/or varnish if you want them to keep, otherwise they'll absorb moisture and get icky. I just covered them in acrylic paint, but my friends also used a varnish and gave them a glittery finish (which I highly recommend... they looked beautiful!). I was going to add varnish to mine after seeing theirs, but turns out there are solvents in varnish that you're not supposed to really be around when you're pregnant.

Luckily, acrylics are safe to work with. My ornaments were really bumpy on the back from drying them on parchment paper. You could just give your cookie sheet a little spritz of cooking spray instead and avoid that.

 

After they're done being decorated and dry, just hang with a ribbon!

I'll probably make some again next year and do one with the little one's hand print!