I’ve made salt dough before at my previous school and my memories of it involved a long time of watching the thing in the oven and a few possible burns as well. With my first holiday program project being salt dough magnets I was keen to find an easy and effective way to get this done. I found a salt dough microwave recipe and I’m going to share it here along with a few tips of what I discovered along the way.
You will need:
1/2 cup of salt
1/2 cup of water
1 cup of flour
Method:
Add the water to the salt and flour slowly.If it gets sticky add more flour, you may not need all the water. (I used all the water)
Roll it out and make the shapes.
Microwave the dough ten seconds at a time for a maximum of three minutes. If you are doing only one object that will only take two minutes max (with thick dough).
I used two methods of making the shapes I wanted. The first one was to put the dough in a thin plastic mold of cars. In the microwave I was only able to do this for one minute before it started showing like it was going to melt. I should have done it for only 30 seconds, which I did for the second batch. For the rest I did hard plastic cutters of a cat, fish and duck. Those were fine for one minute and then I took the cutters off. I still did them (about six at a time) for a total of three minutes but I kept an eye on them, stopping at least every thirty seconds.
Salt dough shapes cooling off
My advice is to do your first batch stopping every ten seconds and then you will have a better idea of how things are going. My dough did puff up a bit.
Leave them to cool off and then you can paint them. I used a paint provided in a kit but I think acrylic would work best. After that had dried I painted them with vanish. A bit smelly and sticky but the idea is that the paint stays on longer!
For the magnets you can buy them at art or stationery stores. I found some square ones at the Crazy store which did already have pictures on, but they served the purpose. You need to be careful that your dough is not too heavy or else they won’t be able to hold anything else up.
Case in point: the duck had a bit of a thin neck which broke. When it broke at home we did it again (a bit thicker all around) and gave it a thick scarf and hat! However it landed up being really heavy: it can only hold up itself on the fridge.
The cars were definitely a hit with the kids and easy to do: you just need one colour and then black for the wheels. They were also fairly light so didn’t weigh down the magnet too much.
