Salt Dough Ornaments

These homemade salt dough ornaments are one of our favorite family crafts during Christmas! This recipe is so easy to follow, and you probably already have all the ingredients you need on hand.

Why You’ll Love This Salt Dough Recipe

This is the exact salt dough recipe my family has used for decades! So you can feel good that these ornaments will turn out great every time. Here’s a few reason why this is the best recipe out there:

What You’ll Need

Go ahead and open up your pantry, because I’m pretty sure you have everything you need to make basic ornaments on hand already. You’ll need:

• All-purpose flour—I recommend sticking with all-purpose flour here because it’s affordable, it’s easy to work with, and it creates the most consistent color. Bleached all-purpose flour is best, but unbleached works, too. Since you aren’t ingesting this at all, go ahead and get the bargain basement generic brand flour to save yourself some cash. Save the whole wheat flour for making waffles or baking bread!
• Table salt—Again, make sure to add the salt to preserve these ornaments! Just like with the flour, go with the generic brand table salt here—reserve your high-end Himalayan sea salt for cooking.
• Warm water—The warm water helps the dough come together a little bit easier. Plus, you’ll knead the dough with your hands, and warm dough is so much more comfortable to knead in the winter!

As far as other tools and materials, chances are, you’ll have almost everything already in your house. Here’s a list of the exact tools I used to make the ornaments seen in these photos:

• Mixing bowl and large spoon
• Parchment paper
• Rolling pin
• Cookie cutters
• Forks, steel wool, rubber stamps, other textural items—optional, to add texture to the ornaments
• Straw or toothpick—for poking a hole for the ornaments to hang from
• Baking sheet
• White spray paint—optional, for giving the ornaments an even background to decorate
• Glitter, glue, paint, Mod Podge—optional, for decorating, or leave the rustic salt dough ornaments
• Polyurethane spray (like this one) or Mod Podge—optional, for extra preservation power
• Ribbon—for hanging the ornaments

Watch The Video

How to Make Salt Dough Ornaments

Follow along with my numbered instructions and step-by-step photos to see exactly how we make these ornaments each Christmas:

Mix up the dough

1. Grab your large mixing bowl, and add in the flour and salt. Stir until well combined. Then, slowly stream in the warm water while stirring. Keep stirring until you’ve added all the water.
2. You’ll get to a point where it is too hard to stir with a spoon. Put it down and use your hands to get in there and mix it well.
3. Once the dough starts to come together, keep kneading with your hands for a few minutes until the dough is smooth and pliable.

Form and shape your ornaments

1. Put down a large piece of parchment paper, and place a good-sized chunk of dough in the middle. Place another large piece of parchment on top.
2. Roll out the dough until 1/8″ thick. You want to err on the side of a thinner dough. Too thick, and the ornaments tend to split or break easily because of air pockets that get trapped in the middle.
3. Remove the top sheet of parchment, and then and then use cookie cutters to cut into the dough cut into the dough—do not try to remove the cut out pieces! You want those to stay on the parchment.
4. When you’re finished cutting the pieces, peel away the excess dough, leaving behind the shapes on the parchment. This is a great time to add any texture to the dough if you want to—like by poking holes with a fork or dappling with a straw.
5. Take a drinking straw, and poke a hole in the top of each ornament for a ribbon to hang from. Make sure to blow out the plug in the end of the drinking straw before you go to the next ornament. Trust me, I’ve ruined a good stainless steel straw or two by forgetting the dough inside and having it drying rock-solid inside!

Baking the ornaments

1. Preheat oven to 200°F.
2. Transfer the whole parchment paper and shapes onto a baking sheet. Bake the ornaments until hard. Start checking at about an hour, but it could take up to two. This isn’t an exact science, because inevitably, your shapes won’t be 100% even in thickness.
3. They are done when they feel hard. They are really done if they start to brown (no worries, that’s something we can fix later!).
4. Let the ornaments cool completely before proceeding to the next step.

Decorating, preserving, and hanging

If you prefer the rustic, classic look of the salt dough, you can hang the ornaments as-is. But I think part of the fun of making salt dough ornaments is getting out the glitter and making a holiday mess.

1. Optional, but I like to mist all of my cooled ornaments with a thin coat of white spray paint. This helps cover up any irregularities in color (like when some got too brown from baking), and I think it helps the ornaments looks more like clay than hard bread.
2. Once the spray paint is dry to the touch, I paint using acrylic paints and brushes (puffy paints would also work wonderfully).
3. I like to use the textural spaces to help guide where I put paint—but it’s really up to you to get creative on how you want to decorate.
4. Where I want glitter, I use Mod Podge or school glue, then add glitter, shaking off the excess onto old newspaper.
5. Sealing the ornaments will help keep all the decorations you just lovingly applied looking great for years to come. Once the decorations are dry, I like to use spray poly, but coating each one in a thin layer of Mod Podge would also do the trick.
6. String up the ornaments using pretty ribbon or twine, and then put those beautiful new ornaments on your Christmas tree!

How to Make Salt Dough Handprints

Salt dough handprint ornaments (or pawprints!) are a great way to mark major milestones in your life! Here’s how to do it:

1. Roll out the dough as directed above, making it very slightly thicker than you would for regular ornaments.
2. Evenly press the hand or foot in the dough.
3. Cut around the handprint or footprint using the rim of a bowl or glass. You might be tempted to do the other way around (cut out the shape first, then get the handprint), but trust me on this one—wiggly, squirmy babies do not know how to center their hands into a shape! You’re better off having a large piece of salt dough to “catch” the print, and then cutting out around it.
4. Proceed with the baking, decorating, and sealing steps.

Variations and Substitutions

There are a few ways to make these ornaments your own, here’s some of the variations on this method I’ve tried out over the years:

• Bake it faster: I’ve baked these at 300°F with good (and fast) results, but you do have to watch them like a hawk to prevent burning.
• Air-dry them:  You could leave the ornaments out to air dry, but the drying process will probably take several days, depending on how thick the ornaments are and how humid it is. You’ll also need to flip the salt dough ornaments several times to keep the edges from curling.
• Coloring the dough: Add in a few drops of food coloring to your dough before baking will result in a nicely colored dough, just know that the colors will slightly shift in the oven (just like they do when you are baking cookies or cupcakes)

Troubleshooting

Why did my salt dough puff up?

Salt dough projects tend to get puffy or bubble if the dough is too thick or if it isn’t rolled out evenly. If the ornaments have air bubbles within them, that can also cause a puffiness.  

My salt dough burned on the edges, but is still soft in the middle!

I know I sound like a broken record, but this is typically a result of the dough not being rolled out evenly. Or could be an oven with hot spots. For the next batch, try rotating your cookie sheet in the oven every 10-15 minutes. If you are still getting burnt spots, try covering the cookie sheet lightly with foil while the middle finishes cooking.

Looking for more Christmas crafts and gifts?

• Cinnamon Ornaments. Looking for another easy holiday ornament craft? You can’t beat our cinnamon ornaments. They smell great and are a blast to make with kids!
• Bird Seed Ornaments. These simple handmade ornaments will bring all the birds to your yard!
• Soup Mixes in a Jar. These affordable gifts in a jar are easy to pull together and make a thoughtful teacher’s gifts, hostess gifts, or gifts for friends and family.
• M&M Cookie Mix in Jar. We gave these M&M Cookie Mixes as gifts a few years back, and everyone absolutely loved them! The cookies that are made from the mix are the BEST.
• Homemade Hot Sauce. Give the gift of some heat! We’ll teach you just how easy it is to make your own homemade hot sauce.