Mother's Day Kids Craft: Salt Dough Handprint Ornament

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Want a way to capture your child’s size for years to come? Consider crafting up a salt dough handprint ornament to gift to someone special! Make this special keepsake for mother’s day or save the concept for Christmas!

I’ve always wanted to try out these salt dough ornament crafts I’ve seen pinned on Pinterest. I chose to follow this tutorial from the Viva Veltoro blog to test out some handprint ornaments, which became our Mother’s Day/Grandmother’s Day craft! I was able to take photos of this process and my then 21 week pregnant belly using my brandy new (from Christmas) AmazonBasics 60-Inch Lightweight Tripod and Vello FreeWave Wireless Remote Shutter Release.

Since Brielle has a new fascination with the kitchen counters and helping me bake, cook, clean or wash her hands, she pulled over her chair and we got to work. The recipe was easy as it was already items we had in our house: flour, water and salt!

After pouring in the ingredients she helped me mix it up!

I kneaded the dough and flattened it out to make our ornaments. I didn’t have any cookie cutters big enough to include her handprint inside so we just grabbed a mug that fit and pressed down to cut a circle.

Brielle explored the extra “scraps” of dough that we didn’t end up using.

She wasn’t a fan of the tacky texture but still seemed curious of the process and let me press her hand down into the dough for the prints. I used a straw to add a hole for ornament to we could hang it later.

After baking in the oven as directed, we let these cool/dry overnight.

Once completely dry, we grabbed our Deco Art Americana Acrylic paints, proper her up in her high chair with her favorite black smock and got to work painting the full ornament with a mixture of Spicy Mustard and Sand (colors previously used on the construction truck themed growth chart I made for my nephews).

I already knew how well these bright, colorful paints provided on wood but now I saw how they provide the same bright coverage on things like salt dough ornaments!

Brielle was a little confused with my direction to make sure “paint your handprint” and instead was just painting her hand. Silly girl!

She had fun with that paintbrush to color all three (with a little help from mom)!

After they dried, we added some ribbon and personalized the back with the date and her age. Brielle loved to put her hand over the ornament and tell me “hand” like she was proud of her work. Great Gramma Ingrid loved hers when we gave it to her at Disney a few weeks back and I’m sure Gwenma will love it when she receives hers today! We even had enough that I could actually have one! Yes, I helped make my own Mother’s Day gift :)

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