Adorable DIY Christmas toys made of salt dough
An indispensable attribute of New Year's Eve is a festive tree decorated with oneself. To do this, you can use any options: a garland, tinsel, pendants made of plastic or glass, and, of course, Christmas tree decorations made of salt dough.
Salted dough is one of the most accessible and understandable materials used in modern art. You can sculpt crafts of any complexity from it, so it is suitable as a working material for any age category.
How to make salt dough with your own hands?
Required ingredients:
- 2 cups of the simplest, wheat flour;
- 1 cup fine salt
- 250 ml of boiled cold water.
All dry ingredients are mixed with each other and, after adding water, knead into an elastic and soft dough. During the cooking process, a little vegetable oil is added to the whole mass (a couple of large spoons), so that the prepared dough does not stick to your hands, does not dry out quickly and does not become covered with a crust while working with it.
How to sculpt toys from dough?
When the dough is ready, you can start the sculpting process itself. To do this, you will need cookie cutters, a rolling pin for rolling out the dough, a brush if you need to moisten future figures with water to attach accessories, cocktail tubes for piercing holes and all kinds of accessories for decoration.
Roll out a small layer of the prepared mass and cut out, using curly molds, future Christmas tree dough toys. Dry the resulting products in an oven preheated to 55-80 ° C, keeping them on a baking sheet covered with parchment for an hour. And after the products are completely dry, start decorating them using all kinds of materials.
Salty dough dog souvenir - video
How to decorate dough toys?
There are a huge number of ways to decorate a future toy, and here everything depends only on personal taste preferences and imagination.
You can use beads to decorate the craft by laying out a certain pattern on the future Christmas tree toy or filling the entire surface of the product cut from the dough with them. True, in this case, it will no longer be possible to dry the craft in the oven, since the beads will simply melt from the high temperature. Here you will have to use the natural drying method, leaving the finished work in an open space for 3-4 days.
Instead of beads, you can use cereals of various varieties, shells, seeds, twigs and leaves of trees, dried berries, buttons, as well as glitters or confetti, applied dried on a toy with glue.
Salted dough crafts decorated with patterns drawn with permanent felt-tip pens look very stylish. To prevent the images on the test from smearing, fix the drawings or inscriptions applied with markers with colorless varnish.
And the easiest way to make a future toy unusual and unique is to put a print of your child's hand or foot on it, marking the date of the craft's manufacture on it. Such a touching souvenir can even be presented as a gift to grandparents.
You can use special pattern stamps instead of body parts.Such things are easy to buy in children's stores or in specialized outlets where goods for creativity and needlework are sold. DIY Christmas decorations made of salt dough, made in a similar way, look quite interesting and original.
And for those who are bored of doing simple crafts, you can try to go even further and make a voluminous Christmas tree toy from salt dough, in the form of some kind of animal: a hedgehog, bird or dog, for example. To do this, it is necessary to first think over its image and structure in the future product, then make the main frame of the body, using a ball of paper or foil for this, filling the inner space of a volumetric toy with it, and only then select and add the missing details. For example, beaded eyes or a pom-pom nose. Here, again, there is a lot of room for the embodiment of creative ideas.
An owl will be an excellent decoration for the Christmas tree.
The finished volumetric craft must be thoroughly dried in a natural way or using a preheated oven, if there are no beads or paper in the decoration of the toy, of course, and then decorate and cover the dried product with two layers of colorless varnish so that the toy does not crack and the paint on it does not burned out from the reflection of the lit garlands located next to her.
DIY dough toys are not only unusual decorations for the holiday tree, making the main beauty of the holiday unique and beautiful, but also a great way to spend time with your family, which brings everyone closer and unites in a single creative process.