Summers here!
Summers here so beach themed crafts are perfect. The pre school art explorers loved making these salt dough shell decorations. They started off by painting lots of shells of various sizes with gorgeous pearlised paints and of course a good smattering of glitter. Whilst these were drying we got the mixing bowls out and made our salt dough.
If you fancy doing this at home its just 2 cups of plain flour, 1 cup of salt and up to 1 cup of water, all mixed together (adding the water gradually until you get a dough consistency). You can also add food colouring at the same time as the water - you need quite a bit. Next you need to give the dough a good kneading and then its ready to make whatever you fancy.
We rolled ours into balls and flattened them, then choose a favourite painted shell to put in the middle and made a hole with playdough tools at one end. I took the decorations home and baked them at a low temperature for 2 hours but as the sun has really come out now you could leave the salt dough to dry in the heat for the day or two. I then varnished them and tied a pretty ribbon through the hole. You could at this stage add paint and extra glitter too. As long as the salt dough is dried properly and painted or varnished it can last for years- we have Christmas tree ones which are at least 5 years old.
