During the spring vacation, you may be doing a lot of cooking and baking. If you have kids, you may want to ease the boredom by including them in some of your baking projects. My son is a bit young for baking, but my neighbor who lives across the street has six kids, and once in a while she complains that her daughter Nickita is always bored. I usually then ask her " What about the hundred and one wii games and the 3ds that you have at your house?"
Last Christmas, Nickita visited my house and of course she brought one of her handheld games on which she was playing one of her favorite cooking games. I remembered a Cooking Art project I did in middle school, and it was then I decided to introduced it to her hoping that it would stimulate her creative abilities.
Dough Craft Ornaments.
The first step to this project is making the dough or clay to bake in varied shapes. Here is the recipe that I used for this.
2 cups of flour
1 cup of table salt
1/2 cup of warm water
Add the flour, the salt, and slowly mix in the water. You can use your hand, a mixer, a blender or any of those bread making appliances. Once you have achieved a good consistency, fold and press the dough with the palm of your hands, kneading it for about 15 minutes.
Once the dough can be rolled up in to a sturdy ball, roll between both palms of your hands as if making a straw. If there are cracks in the dough, you may need to knead it again with a little more water. If the dough is too soft, just add a little more flour and knead again until you achieve the desired result.
If the dough seems ready then we can get ready to make our shapes to bake. Thicker objects will take longer.
If you don't have cookie cutters then you can make stencils out of card board.
Flatten the dough out to cut shapes out with your cookie cutter or stencil. Then it's time to bake our ornaments. A 1/4 inch object at 300 degrees takes about 3 hours.
Use some sand paper to smoothen out the baked figures after baking and cooling. When it seems nice and smooth, its time to use your acrylic paint and other items to decorate your figure.
Acrylic Paints
Paint Brushes
Beads
Clear Varnish
Since it was the holiday season, we decided to make some stars to use as decorations for the tree.
So we had also put a small hole in the dough before baking at the top of the figures in order to string with some tiny red and green ribbon.
We had a lot of fun painting and decorating our stars we used gold, red and green paint.
After painting, we waited for the paint to dry, then we put some clear varnish to give it a gloss.
The results were beautiful. Decorations are not all you can do with Dough Craft. You can also create your own refrigerator magnets by sticking small magnets behind your dough craft. Now that's really cool!
After doing all this crafting, cleaning up can really be a drag, and if you're like me you get all caught up in the making without taking much precautions, you may find yourself with a multicolored counter top.
Don't worry, Clorox is really good to get those stains out. I have a white counter top so I always keep a bottle around to bleach out stains.
Visit the Facebook page for Clorox. There are some awesome activities that are taking place right now.
Don't forget to hit the like button.
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