Autumnal Salt Dough Decorations

Ever since my mum and I watched Kirstie's Homemade Christmas many moons ago (when I was in high school in fact), we have been obsessed with making salt dough. Salt dough is wonderful, and makes the most perfect autumn/winter craft – it's easy, it's accessible, it's cheap, and best of all, anybody can do it!

Salt dough is SO simple to make, it's so so so easy! To make salt dough, you simply need:

- 2 cups of plain flour

- 1 cup of salt

- 3/4 cup of cold water (but add accordingly)

We also added the following spices so that the salt dough smells festive:

- Cinnamon

- Cloves

- Nutmeg

- Ginger

Simply whack all of the above in a bowel (as pictured above), and combine! It's really that simple. Once combined, and you've got a nice malleable dough, you can get to work on rolling out, and cutting into shapes. Before you cut your dough into shapes, make sure you preheat your oven to 40 degrees C.

To cut out shapes from salt dough, we used some leaf shaped cutters we bought online from America, and a toadstool shaped cutter too. We also used some Scrabble cutters that I got last fall from Lakeland. 

Once the salt dough has been rolled out, and cut into shapes, I will then use a pencil to make holes in the decorations (it's vital you do this before baking). I place all of the decorations onto a greased baking tray, and then place into the oven (still on 40) for 3 to 4 hours.

Once the dough has baked and cooled, it should be rock hard. This means it's time to decorate! You can decorate your decorations in any way you wish – glitter, food colourings, paints, or anything else you can think of.

For our leaves and toadstools, we used a mixture of food colourings, food lustre dusts, acrylic paint, and water colours.

I really hope you enjoyed this little mini tutorial. I adore autumn so much, and I adore decorating for fall. It's such a shame that England doesn't celebrate autumn as much as America, which means there's barely any fall themed decorations – but I don't let it stop me, as I make my own!

Let me know what you think of these beautiful decorations, and let me know if you decide to make these lovely little salt dough decorations.