Are considered:
1) The material for creativity does not require financial investments, because most often the components necessary for its preparation are at hand.
2) Salt dough is easily washed off hands, does not stain clothes and the surface used for modeling.
3) The mass does not stick to hands during use, keeps its shape perfectly and has high density.
4) You can dry molded figures both in the open air and in the oven.
5) As a means for coloring crafts, you can use both food coloring and standard coloring materials (gouache, acrylic paints, watercolor, etc.).
6) Coating finished products with varnish significantly increases the duration of their original attractiveness.

It is better to take the most common flour for salt dough without all kinds of additives and impurities. For example, flour, on the packaging of which there is an inscription “for pizza”, “pancake” or “for pancakes”, is completely unsuitable for preparing material. Crafts from such products, when dried, can rise well, and later completely crack. Refuse rye flour as well - the dough from it will certainly turn out to be hard and inelastic, and it will be very difficult to sculpt from it.

Salt for the dough, use the usual fine salt. Iodized and sea will not work - their large grains will not dissolve, and the dough will turn out to be heterogeneous “speckled”. As for water, it is better to use cold water, and it is not worth pouring salt and flour at once with the entire volume of liquid, it is more correct to add water a little bit and immediately knead the dough thoroughly.

Additional components can also be used to endow the mass for modeling with certain properties in the process of preparing salt dough. So, dry wallpaper paste will make the future more durable, hand cream and vegetable oil will give plasticity to the material, and food coloring will color the mass in desired color.

Classic salt dough with a minimum amount of ingredients - perfect option. To prepare it, combine half a glass of fine salt and a slightly smaller amount of water at room temperature in a deep bowl. Stir the mixture well and put it aside for 25 minutes to infuse.

Pour half a glass of flour into the salt solution, stir the mixture well with a fork, knife or whisk. Try to immediately break up the resulting lumps to obtain an elastic homogeneous mass. If the dough is runny, add more flour. Pay attention to the fact that the mass does not crumble and does not fall apart, knead it with your hands until it turns into a steep dough. Check the readiness of the material with your finger. Leave its trace in the mass, and if the print "does not float", but keeps its shape, salty dough ready for sculpting.

To prepare a material that is more delicate in texture, which differs from traditional salt dough in a lower density, you will need 2 cups of water, 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of salt, and 1 tablespoon vegetable oil and citric and acid. Such a mass does not stick to hands at all, is easy to process and does not require much effort when forming various figures, which is why it is considered an ideal material for children's creativity.

To prepare the custard salt dough, pour the water into a small saucepan and heat it, without bringing it to a boil. Add vegetable oil to the liquid. Combine dry ingredients in a deep bowl, mix well and gradually pour over hot water while periodically stirring the mass with a fork or whisk. At first, the dough will seem very liquid to you, but over time, the flour will boil, and the mass will become more dense. Knead the material until it turns into an elastic, viscous dough, ideal for shaping a wide variety of figures.

If you introduce food coloring in powder, liquid or tablet form into the salt dough at the stage of mixing the ingredients, you can immediately get a material for modeling a certain shade. To prepare colored salty dough in a deep bowl, combine 300 g of flour, 300 g of salt and 200 ml of water, knead a thick dough that does not stick to your hands.

Divide the mass into several parts, each of which will later acquire a certain shade. Make a small indentation in each piece with your finger, put a few drops of water and dye into the hole, wait until the mixture is absorbed and knead the dough again. If the colored mass dries up, add a small amount of vegetable oil to it. Follow the same procedure with all the remaining pieces. Spread the colored material in plastic bags and refrigerate for several hours.

The next integral step in creating figures from salt dough is drying them in the oven, in which several important recommendations should be taken into account:
- the approximate drying time of products in an electrical cabinet at a temperature of 75 and 100 ° C is an hour, at a temperature of 120 ° C - 45 minutes, at a temperature of 150 ° C - half an hour (in a gas oven this process will take 2 times longer);
- for drying products decorated with beads, rhinestones and other decorative elements, set the temperature not exceeding 120°C;
- periodically turn the crafts to achieve the most uniform drying;
- so that the figures do not stick to the baking sheet, lay food foil on it.

Our distant ancestors decorated the surface of loaves with figured images of spikelets, berries, leaves before baking to attract good luck and receive blessings from their deities. Today we do it without any religious background, just for beauty.

In addition to decorating edible products, the use of dough of a special composition allows you to create very spectacular and beautiful decorative figurines, pictures and flowers. In this case, the dough perfectly replaces more complex and expensive materials, so it is ideal for young children. But this is such an exciting activity that adult respectable people are also happy to do it.

Everyone can use salt dough for self-expression and relaxation, it is only important to know how to make a durable and plastic material, as well as competently dry and color the finished product.

The subtleties of making dough for crafts

The modeling of products itself is no different from working with plasticine or other similar materials. The advantage of salt dough is that it is more plastic, less dirty hands and surrounding objects, gives more opportunities for complex work, and also perfectly preserved after proper drying, becoming hard and durable.

  1. The difficulty lies in how to prepare the right dough that will not stick to hands and tools, will not crack and crumble. To do this, you need to use several simple advice:
  2. Do not take pancake flour for work - it is more sticky and the dough will turn out to be of poor consistency.
  3. Use only fine "Extra" type salt. Coarse salt will create a coarse crumbly dough due to grains when kneaded directly dry, and dissolving such salt in water will take too long. In addition, there may be impurities in rock salt that will stain the modeling dough, and Extra salt is purified and very fine.

By diluting the flour with ice water, you can get an excellent, plastic and very homogeneous dough.

Using these simple tips, you can start working with your children, creating a variety of products of amazing beauty. Salt dough is simple, inexpensive and very available material for creativity, and children are just crazy about such useful entertainment.

Used tools and materials

When we sculpt from salt dough, we need special tools to work. They are all found in our homes, in our kitchens, or among stationery, sewing and craft supplies.

Basic tools and materials for work:

  • Rolling pin for rolling dough. If it is not there or the existing one is too large for children's hands, you can find a replacement in the form of an ordinary glass bottle.
  • Knife for cutting dough. Children can be given a plastic knife from a set of colored plasticine.
  • Board for rolling dough and making products.
  • Paints for coloring (watercolor, acrylic, gouache - any water-soluble dyes).
  • Varnishes for finishing (water-based, best in aerosols). Additionally, you can use spray varnishes "with special effects" - "snow", with sparkles, gold, silver or other metallic varnish.
  • A set of brushes for coloring.
  • Water container.
  • Forms for cookies.
  • A variety of items to add texture to the finished product - toothbrushes, combs, knitting needles, buttons, lace and more.

For small children, special clothing should be provided, as they can get very dirty. Stock up on a pack of dry and wet wipes before work - they are convenient not only to clean your hands, but also to get your brushes wet from excess paint. So it will be possible to avoid the spreading of dyes over the finished little thing.

Three best recipes

To knead salt dough, you can use own hands or entrust this process to modern technology - a mixer or dough mixer. With their help, you can get a particularly smooth and elastic dough.

In order for the finished product not to crumble, you need to pre-fill the salt with the required volume of water, and then mix it thoroughly with flour. It is important to mix the product well until completely homogeneous, otherwise the finished item may crack or break into separate pieces during drying.

Basic Recipe:

  • A glass of flour (wheat or rye).
  • A glass of finely ground salt of the "Extra" type.
  • Half a glass of ice water.

Mix the ingredients and knead the dough until smooth. This recipe is great for crafts with fine details: to create flowers, leaves, ornamental plants and so on.

Plastic soft dough recipe:

  • Flour - one glass.
  • Fine salt - one glass.
  • The water is very cold - half a glass.
  • Vegetable oil - 2 tablespoons.

Instead of oil, you can take glycerin, a fairly fatty cream or cooking oil. The introduction of fats or oils into the salt dough recipe makes it more plastic and elastic, and also avoids cracking of the product after drying. This option is especially suitable for "thick-walled" products, which can break if the dough is completely dry.

For work with fine details or many small elements, you will need to use an improved salt dough recipe:

  • 1.5 cups flour.
  • 1 glass of salt.
  • 0.5 cups of water.
  • 2 - 3 tablespoons of PVA glue, wallpaper glue like "Metilan" or any other water-soluble glue.

Such dough keeps its shape perfectly, small thin elements can be made from it, and with definitely “stuffed” hands, you can make things that are outwardly indistinguishable from good porcelain.

Any recipe for salt dough can be regarded as a basis, since you can modify it “for yourself” endlessly, experimenting with various ingredients until you get the right composition.

How to Dry Salt Dough Perfectly

The main difficulty for beginners is the technology of drying the finished product. Drying can be done in different ways:

  • "Bake" in a heated oven like regular cookies, at a temperature ranging from 50 to 80 degrees (depending on the size and thickness of the product). The finished little thing is placed on parchment paper for baking and placed in a preheated oven for about an hour. The duration of processing depends on the dimensions of the product. Until completely cool oven the thing is not taken out of it.
  • Drying in a cold oven, that is, the product is placed in a cold oven, the heat is turned on and brought to the desired temperature. Everything else is exactly the same as in the previous paragraph.
  • Salt dough products are best simply air dried, although this takes a long time. A well-dried craft becomes durable, hard and not subject to external influence. Normal drying is great for small or delicate items.

Do not use electrical appliances or a central heating battery for drying. They dry the dough unevenly, which can cause cracking or damage to the thing if it has dried on only one side, has a dry surface and “raw insides”.

Used dyes and finishing materials

When preparing salt dough, the dye can be injected directly into the product itself and get a material very similar to plasticine. But the difficulty in this case will be working with the material - you will have to connect individual colored parts, and for kids it's too difficult. Everyone loves to work with paints, so for children it is preferable to use the schedule of a ready-made monophonic little thing.

In work, it is easiest to use water-soluble paints. Acrylic dyes are very good - they give a dense and uniform color, have a large color palette and easy to use, dry quickly. But you can also use regular watercolor. It gives a beautiful translucent layer, and paints can be layered with glazes to obtain special effects - volume, transition of tones, overflows and acquiring different textures. If there is a need to obtain an opaque staining with watercolors, you can use a white primer. Its role can be played by white acrylic paint, gouache or tempera with the addition of PVA glue to hold it on the surface of the product.

For decoration, you can use bulk paints, metallized dyes, beads different sizes and shapes, buttons, rhinestones and other little things that do not deteriorate from high temperature if drying in the oven is planned.

Is it worth varnishing crafts?

In principle, the finished salt dough craft holds paint very well, but if you plan to use this thing, for example, for games, or it is a chess piece, a decorative vase, a box, in a word, a thing that will suffer from constant touching, then it should be covered varnish. It will not only protect finished products from external influences, but also give a beautiful glossy sheen, which is necessary for many types of crafts.

The easiest way to use varnish in aerosols, carrying out processing in the open air or in a well-ventilated area. If necessary, varnishing can be repeated several times, drying each previous layer well. To give a special decorative effect, you can use special sprays, for example, with the effect of snow or sparkles.

Salt dough types

For toddlers or beginners, you need to use simpler forms and objects that they understand. You can start sculpting with traditional cats or dogs, fruits and berries, cars and other simple figures without numerous and complex details. Gradually, with an increase in the level of skill and the young sculptors themselves, the work can be complicated, moving on to the creation of figures, paintings and compositions.

The pinnacle of craftsmanship can be considered the creation of flowers from bioceramics, as salt dough is also called. Of course, even a baby can make a simple chamomile, but only an “advanced” user can make a full-fledged bouquet of roses or a flowering jasmine branch.

To learn how to work with salt dough, you need to follow the instructions step by step and do not rush to take on complex products.

A variety of panels and paintings from dough with salt

Creating pictures from dough is not as difficult as it seems. At the first stages of creativity, it is worth using a hint in the form of a photograph of the future “work of art”. For example, you want to create a beautiful autumn landscape. Find beautiful photo with a small amount small parts and use it for inspiration.

  • A piece of thin plywood is suitable as the basis for the picture, but if it is not available, you can also use thick cardboard. A rolled out layer of dough is superimposed on the surface of the base. It can be glued with any suitable glue.
  • All the details of the future picture are cut out or fashioned from salt dough and superimposed on each other as they move away from the background of the picture. That is, the objects farthest from the viewer will be laid out on the base first. This method will allow you to get very neat and expressive volumetric images.
  • The finished picture is thoroughly dried, and then painted with suitable paints. After the paints have dried, the picture is varnished and placed in a frame. The product is ready, it can be hung on the wall in the room or given to someone who can appreciate the creativity and talent of the performer.

If you use foil as the basis for the product, the dried and painted part can be easily removed from it and then transferred to any other material. It can be a dense fabric stretched over a frame, glass, plastic, even metal. Such flat and at the same time voluminous products can be used to decorate boxes, decorate children's furniture, boxes with various things, or be used to identify, for example, lockers for things in a kindergarten locker room.


Figurines and dolls made of bioceramics

For kids, there is nothing more interesting than sculpting "little men". They really like "cartoon" characters, for example, fixies, Masha from a cartoon about a bear, heroes of comics and fairy tales. From salt dough, you can make not only figurines and dolls, but also various houses, benches, trees, fountains - in a word, everything that fantasy can suggest.

If you plan to make fairly large figures, you should take care of the internal frame and stands for stable standing. Desulphurized matches, plastic and wooden toothpicks can be used as a support for small plastics, cocktail skewers or Asian chopsticks may be required for larger items. Save wooden ice cream sticks - they can be the basis of many different products.

For stability, the figures must be placed on a salt dough base in the shape of a circle or oval - this will ensure a flat plane.

If the figure is depicted in motion, it may be necessary to create a wire frame - it will help in modeling and will not allow the finished product to crumble.

In addition to voluminous, three-dimensional figures of people and animals, various fruits or vegetables can be created from salt dough. They are beautiful both on their own and as part of various compositions. For example, elegant fruits can be effectively laid out on a beautiful dish and decorate the kitchen or dining room with them.

Flat figures can be cut out with cookie cutters. Hearts can become original valentines, Christmas trees can decorate the New Year's table, flowers can be used to mark places when seating guests at a holiday. Only fantasy can limit the scope of various dough products.




Spectacular flowers and plants from flour salt

The pinnacle of craftsmanship is thin and graceful flowers made from flour salt, as salt dough is also called. This work requires great perseverance, talent and accuracy, so it is more suitable for adults and teenagers. Toddlers, on the other hand, can successfully sculpt stylized flowers of a simple shape.

How to mold a complex three-dimensional flower, for example, a rose?

  • You need to take a piece of dough and roll the core out of it in the form of a drop. The base of the drop is the bottom of the flower.
  • Then you need to thinly roll out the dough and cut out rose petals of different sizes and shapes from it.
  • By carefully placing one petal after another on a teardrop-shaped base, you can get a rose blank. To make it look like a real flower, each petal must be carefully bent, giving it a natural shape and shape.
  • To complete the work, you need to create a cup of a flower with folded sepals, cut out some beautiful leaves with carved edges and connect all the details together with wire and pieces of salt dough.
  • Finished crafts are left to dry completely, and then painted in the selected colors.

By this principle, you can create any flowers, whole bouquets, complex compositions and even imitations of plants in pots. The choice of plot depends on the imagination and creativity of the creator. good example can become a cute cactus, which is supposed to be kept near the computer. living plant, even as stable as a cactus may not survive in an office environment, but a lovely prickly creature made of salt dough will survive any cataclysms perfectly.

How to deal with possible problems

In any work, errors may occur, or things may not go at all as expected. Even if you do everything in stages, taking into account all the nuances, product defects may appear. Basically, these are cracking and chipping of individual parts of the product.

Cracks in crafts appear due to the wrong composition of the dough, errors in drying, or the beginning of coloring the finished item when the base is not completely dry. If the cracks are small or the surface of the product is covered with a thin network of small cracks, they can be repaired.

To do this, you need to dry the thing completely, and then carefully sand the defects with sandpaper of varying degrees of abrasiveness. You can bring the surface to the ideal with “velvet” sandpaper. Then the surviving cracks can be puttied with a dough slightly diluted with water and salt. You may have to repeat the procedure several times if the cracks are very deep.

The lesson learned will teach that the basis of the future thing needs to be given much more attention than even the finish - not only depends on its quality appearance the product itself, but also the very fact of its existence.

It happens that during the drying process, part of the product simply disappears, especially often this happens with thin parts or fragile small fragments. Sometimes the elements of the work break off during the schedule with too much exposure. In order to repair a toy with an even break line, you can use ordinary PVA glue. Apply layers of glue carefully so that ugly streaks do not form. The finished and dried item must be sanded and re-painted and varnished.

If a product made from fresh dough has broken, it is enough to moisten the fracture points with water, press the individual parts against each other and wait for setting. Decorate the dried work as planned.

Lost damaged figurine individual elements you can try to restore it by replacing the missing parts with pieces of fresh dough. Dry and fresh elements may not bond securely, so after the new parts dry, they may need to be glued together for strength.

Give yourself and your children the pleasure of creativity, because working with dough is easy and pleasant, and the cost of materials is negligible. The result of the work can exceed any expectations!


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