Try this easy recipe for homemade clay ornaments you can make with ingredients you already have at home. The kids love making their own holiday ornaments and it will keep them entertained during Christmas break!! (“And mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again!…..hehehe)
Clay Christmas Ornaments
I have a “holiday tree”. I love the ambiance of a Christmas tree so I decided to keep a small 3 ft. tree up all year and decorate it different each month. I have wanted to do this for years and finally just did it in 2002. I came up with this idea a long time ago before it was the in thing to do. Now I’m in style I guess. :-) I love it! I find little things to decorate it at the thrift store, garage sales or at end of season clearance sales.
Even though I found some really cute small pumpkins and gourds and small leaves for my September fall tree (and at 90+ degrees it hasn’t even come close to feeling like fall), I couldn’t find any Halloween decorations. I love Halloween but I don’t get into the really gory, scary stuff. I decided to make my own Halloween decorations. I used the clay ornament recipe from Dining On A Dime and Not Just Beans.
Mom has some small pumpkin and ghost cookie cutters that she uses for her gingerbread men so I borrowed those and painted them with paints I already had. I will be able to decorate my tree for around $1. (I did find some cute garland that I bought on clearance.)
It’s kind of fun working on the holiday tree and it does bring me joy. I can’t really garden, decorate the house outside for the season (we really get into it!) or do my dried florals at this time in my life so that one little thing does help and is fun being creative with it.
Tawra
This is a fun recipe for the kids to make over the long Thanksgiving weekend.
Clay Christmas Ornaments
Ingredients
4 cups all purpose flour
1 cup salt
1 tsp. powdered alum
1 1/2 cups water
Instructions
Mix ingredients well in a large bowl.
If the dough is too dry, work in another tablespoon of water with your hands. The dough can be rolled or molded and can be colored with a few drops of food coloring.
To roll:
- Roll dough 1/8 inch thick on a lightly floured board.
- Cut with cookie cutters dipped in flour.
- Insert wire or make a hole in the top of each ornament about 1/4 inch down for hanging.
To mold:
- Preheat oven to 250°.
- Shape the dough no more than 1/2 inch thick.
- Bake ornaments on ungreased cookie sheet for 30 minutes.
- Turn and bake another 1 1/2 hours until hard and dry.
- Remove and cool.
- When done, paint and seal with spray varnish. You can lightly sand before painting to make the paint adhere better.
For more easy holiday recipes, check out volume 1 of our cookbook!
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I love this idea. I made clay ornaments wih my niece and nephew a few years back at Christmas. I thought we would do Christmas themed at the time but they had a whole set of Mickey Mouse cookie cutters so thats what we did. They painted them totally different than I would have….and their litttle tree turned out just perfect…it was just as nice as an adult could have done and they were only 3 and 4 at the time. Great fun, inexpensive, and a great gift for parents from their kidos.
One year when my kids were small, we used a salt dough to make ornamental plaques for the grandparents for Christmas. We cut out small plate sized disks of the dough, then had each child imprint their hand outline in the dough. Next, we decorated the rim of the disk with coloured beans or popcorn kernels. Then we let it dry for several days and eventually varnished them to preserve them. I had made a good sized hanging hole on the top of each disk, (before it dried) and we ran a strong ribbon through each one for hanging. We sent these to the grandparents, but it was mostly a craft to keep the kids busy. Needless to say, they became a family treasure to the grandparents. A few years back, my daughter-in-law did a similar thing, with a much smaller disk, that had the footprint of my enfant grandson on it. Priceless! This might be an idea that can be adapted for Christmas tree ornaments.
I read an article on Clark Howard’s website, clarkhoward.com, about a dog who died after eating a Christmas ornament made of salt dough that the family had made for the holidays. The salt content in the ornament is what made the dog sick. Salt is toxic to cats and dogs according to the Pet Poison Helpline. The family has issued a warning concerning what happened to their dig in the hope that another such tragedy might be averted.