Salt Dough Handprints

 Salt Dough Handprints

I have been wanting to have a go at making some salt dough to capture princess and the grapie's handprints for while and Grandma's birthday was the perfect excuse!

What we used:
1 cup flour
1 cup salt
1/2 cup water
The size of the cup doesn't matter too much as long as the ratio is the same.
We actually also weighed our ingredients (as princess was learning about weighing things at preschool and I wanted to show her that some things may look the same but weigh different amounts) although I think the cups method is actually easiest in this case!
125g salt
75g flour
(we didn't measure the water)

Mix all the ingredients together. This took a little while and princess got a bit bored and handed over mixing responsibility to me after a bit, but eventually it all comes together. Try not to be too quick to add more water as ours looked dry for a while but was fine after a bit.

Then for the good bit- kneading with your hands. This was lots of fun and was like playing with play-doh

I also had a 'turn', and gave it a good knead until it was no longer grainy. Then I split the dough into 2 and pushed the first lot of dough into the bottom a bowl to get a flat edge and turned it out.

I had to repeat this step several times as Princess found that drumming the dough with a spoon and poking it was much more fun than making the perfect handprint, and Grapie just wanted to grab it and squeeze the dough! 

We eventually got the prints perfectly, then it was into the oven on a baking sheet lined tin, for 3 hours at around 100 degrees. I turned them over after 2 hours so the back could cook too.

When they were dry, we painted them pink and sprinkled glitter on them an  let them dry in a sunny spot.

Princess was very proud to give them to her grandma for her birthday and they now have pride of place on grandma's shelf as a reminder of how much joy two tiny pairs of hands bring to her life