Salt Dough Christmas Ornaments and Decorations - TinkerLab (2024)

Salt Dough Christmas Decorations

In the first part of this 2-part salt dough ornament post I shared the salt dough recipe and how to bake it here.In this post I’ll give you my best tips for painting and decorating salt dough ornaments with kids.

Let me start by saying that these were made as a collaboration between me and my 3-year old. I love how they turned out, and how my 3 year old can proudly share gifts from her heart with her friends.

Supplies for Salt DoughChristmas Decorations

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• Acrylic Paint. This set gives you a wide variety of colors.
• Small paintbrushes. A set like this will give you a variety of brush sizes and choices.
• Table cover
• Glitter. Martha Stewart makes a set that comes 12 colors.
• Apron
• Water jar for cleaning brushes
• Rag for drying the wet brushes
• salt dough ornaments

Less you think everything comes together like magic over here, I found that this project involved a lot of *stuff* and have eighttips that will make it more fun and less headache…

Set up your Ornament Painting Station

1. Gather your materials ahead of time.
2. Cover the table. Acrylic paint will not easily come off of surfaces and clothing.
3. Set this up outdoors. Always a wise move if glitter is involved.Even if it’s freezing, it’ll be worth it. No glitter? Indoors will do the trick.
4. Palette: Use a paper plate for a palette and squeeze small amounts of paint on the plate.
5. Paint:Use acrylic paints. Don’t mess around with tempera. Acrylic is archival and the ornaments will look beautiful when you take them out year-after-year. FYI: Acrylic paint will not wash out of clothing.
6. Add some shine. Use glitter or metallic paint. Make it sparkle. It’s the holidays, after all!
7. Limit the palette.I limited ours to red, white, and green. For Chanukkah, you could use blue, white, and silver. With young children, fewer paint choices make things simpler.
8. If you follow these steps, when you’re done, all you should have to clean are the brushes and hands.

How to Make Christmas Salt Dough

N got pretty good at painting the ornaments while maintaining minimal contact with the paint.

Shewanted to use glitter glue, sometimes all by itself and sometimes on top of paint. The beauty of having a ton of blank ornaments is that they’re ripe for painting experiments. No two ornaments were the same.

Painting the glitter glue was fun, too.

And then wepulled out our entire glitter collection! There’s no stopping us from…

…dumping the glitterlike snow, all over the ornaments and workspace.Once more, so happy that I took this project outside. And lucky that it wasn’t a cold or windy day.

And there they are, ready to be strung with ribbons and hung somewhere festive. The glitter sticks right to the acrylic paint, but as a final step, you could seal these with clear acrylic medium like this, which would help keep all the loose glitter on the ornament and off of everything it brushes against.