Salt Dough Snowman Keepsake for Kids to Make

We have been loving our Salt dough creations over the past few months. If you have been following our posts you will have seen us creating keepsakes for Valentines Day, Easter Halloween and Christmas! 

Always great fun to make and family and friends always love receiving them!

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This one we made for our mantle piece, that I will enjoy bringing out each year. Shes just turned 3 and I can't quite get over how fast the months are rolling around!

You will need: 

Salt 

Plain Flour 

Water 

Straw 

Ribbon/String 

Acrylic Paints (I highly recommend - This amazing pack of Acrylic Paints)

Marker Pen 

Rolling Pin 

Paint Brushes 

To begin with you will need to make a batch of Salt Dough, incredibly easy to make! You can find our simple recipe and 'how to' guide here. You can also print it out for future reference. What I like about our guide is children can be really involved in the process. They can help follow the instructions and measure out the ingredients. An adult will need to add the hot water and wait until its cooled down enjoy before allowing children to help knead all the ingredients together to make the dough.

The recipe above will be enough to make this plaque with a small batch remaining. We used the remaining dough to create the Christmas Tree Thumb Prints.

Use a roller to roll out a large enough area to make two hands printed. I would highly advise that you roll the dough out onto grease proof paper. It will make your life so much easier when you want to transport it and also when you flip it round in the oven to bake. 

Be mindful of how thick the salt dough is. You want the plaque to be thick enough to make it sturdy but not too thick that you are waiting weeks and weeks for it to dry out. Place it in the oven on a low heat (find details in our Salt Dough post).

Depending what you want to do with your plaque - you may want to add some holes using a straw so you can thread some string through and hang it up. 

Once it was ready I began by adding the 'snow'. I needed a thin paintbrush for this to be able to create neat lines. In all honesty with all our crafts I always stick to children's paint brushes. I find they work great. My initial plan was to stop there and have some dinner but I just couldn't resist carrying on!
As I mentioned above I enjoy using Reeves acrylic paint. I brought a set of small tubes several months ago. It's such good quality and it lasts so long! The smallest amount goes a such a way!

I added the blue sky and it really started to take shape. I left it to dry (which didn't take very long) and then returned to start adding some detail to the snowmen.

I could have done with an even thinner brush to add the detail. I was thinking what else I could use as an alternative. The end of the paintbrush was too thick and so was Q-tips. I was glancing over the room to see if anything else jumped out at me and da daaaa - Little N's chunky pencils. They were all nice and sharp so I used the sharp end to create all the dots. 

I used them to add the scarves too, in fact I found painting with the thick pencils much easier than painting with a brush. I felt like I had more sturdy control.

Once this was all dry I added snow falling from the sky and used some 'Let it Snow' Ribbon to finish off the top. There is still room to add string if I wish to hang it but this year its sitting on my mantle piece.

Lets take a look at the craft in action:
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