Salt dough? who knew it could be so much fun!

Remember doing salt dough ornaments as a kid?  We did a lot of Christmas ornaments cutting out shapes with cookie cutters and painting them.  Well, salt dough has made a come back with folks doing all kinds of things with them.  The next several posts will be about some of the things you can do/make with this inexpensive dough.  There are several recipes you can find, but the one I go to is 2 cups flour, 1 cup salt and 1 cup water.  

 So find a bowl you can mix those ingredients up in and let's get started.  I love working with this dough, but it does dry out your hands.  Just a warning.

 Sometimes you will need to add a little more water, remember this isn't rocket science!  and have fun!  I do knead mine some, I don't know that its necessary, I just love kneading dough, its like therapy to me!

 Roll the dough out evenly, on a floured surface.  The thicker your dough the longer it will take to dry, but it does tear easier.  I'd say this was maybe 1/4" thick.  I wanted to make the buttons you saw in the first picture.  My idea was to make them into coasters, for a button loving woman I know. 

 So to cut the circles as big as I wanted them, I used a plastic storage container.  It had a slight lip on it, which was just perfect for cutting through the dough. I cut 5 circles from the dough.

 For the button holes, I used a straw.  You can do several holes, before the end of the straw gets plugged up and you need to empty it to make more holes.

 I didn't measure mine, just eye-balled them.  If you want to measure, feel free to do so.

 I knew that I was going to use jute as my "thread" when I had them painted.  I thought if I gave the jute a grove before I did the baking, there would be a nice place for the jute to lay. (More about this later!)

 I also knew I wanted the buttons to have an indent a little ways from the edge, like some buttons do.  So to achieve this, I used a piece of stemware that was about 1/4"-1/2" away from the outer edge. When I had that centered on the button, I pushed it down to make an indent.

I put these on aluminum foil and baked them in the oven.  I used the convection feature in the oven, to hurry the process along.  You don't want to burn them but you want to make sure they are good and dry.  These took several hours.  Finishing will be another post!