Make your own salt dough
Your children can have hours of creative fun moulding simple salt dough into shapes and decorating them
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What you need
3 cups flour • 1 cup salt • 1¼ cups water • 1 tbsp glycerine (available from chemists or large supermarkets) • Food colouring (optional) • Baking tray lined with foil or greaseproof paper • Poster paints
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Step 1
Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. You can also add some drops of food colouring to the water at this stage if you’d like to make a coloured dough.
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Step 2
Knead together until you have an elastic dough. Now you can make it into shapes, either by moulding it with your hands or rolling it flat and cutting out shapes with a cookie cutter or plastic knife.
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Step 3
To make a caterpillar, roll nine balls of dough, each one slightly smaller than the last, then sandwich the balls together. Add two small pieces of dough for the eyes. You can preserve your finished figures by baking them. Pre-heat your oven to 150ºC/300ºF/gas mark 2, place them on a baking tray cook - small figures will take about 1½ hours to harden, while thicker models will take a little longer. If the figures start to brown, turn the heat down.
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Step 4
Once the figures have cooled completely they can be decorated with poster paints. For a professional finish you can add a coat of clear varnish after the paint has dried.
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Alternative design
To make a butterfly, simply add two flat wing-shaped pieces of dough to either side of a caterpillar shape before cooking and painting your model.
Try this!
Keep any spare dough in a zipped plastic bag or tub in the fridge. It should keep for at least a week.
Alternatively, download our PDF instructions to print out and follow in your own time.
To open this document you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader
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