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The Craft Train

Crafty ideas for kids and parents

You are here: Home / Crafts and Activities / Holiday Crafts / Halloween Salt Dough Ornaments

Halloween Salt Dough Ornaments

October 2, 2021 By Kate Leave a Comment

This post may contain affiliate links. I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post at no cost to you.

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These simple Halloween salt dough ornaments are a tactile, fun and easy Halloween craft idea for kids. 

First, there is the sensory part of kneading the dough, rolling it out and then pressing the ornaments out with the Halloween-themed cookie cutters. After that, the creative part of painting and decorating them after you’ve baked them in the oven like cookies.

You might also like our Halloween Paper Craft Collection

Halloween salt dough ornaments kids can make

My kids are crazy about Halloween. They love Halloween crafting almost as much as Christmas crafting so this year I decided to create some salt dough ornaments with them.

If you’ve never worked with salt dough before it’s just like play dough which you can bake to harden and it’s simple enough for kids to make by themselves. They will love mixing it up, rolling it and cutting little cookie cutter shapes from the dough.

Best of all it’s made from ingredients commonly found in most homes so you shouldn’t need to rush out and buy anything (except maybe cookie cutters if you don’t already have them). In this post we’ll share our recipe as well as a simple tutorial to make these spooky Halloween salt dough ornaments.

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salt dough making process

How to make Halloween salt dough ornaments

You Will Need:

• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 cup cooking salt
• 1 cup water
• Halloween cookie cutter shapes – this set is similar to ours but not exactly the same
• Cooking utensils: rolling pin, pastry mat (we use flexible cutting mats similar to this one here), baking tray, skewer
• Acrylic paints and brushes
• String for hanging

How To:

Add the flour and salt to a mixing bowl and stir in the water. Mix until it forms a dough, if it is a bit sticky you can add more flour until it has a consistency like play dough.

salt dough and cookie cutters on table

Roll your dough out on a pastry mat and press the cookie cutter shapes into it. Use a skewer to poke wide holes for threading string through later on. Note: Our holes shrunk a fair bit in the baking process, some turned out too closed up to thread a piece of string through so be sure to make your holes wider than you need them to be.

Place the cookie shapes on a baking tray and bake them in a pre-heated oven at a low temperature for around three hours.

Important: Baking times and temperatures can vary considerably in different ovens. Our oven is a very hot fan-forced oven and we baked ours at around 80ºc (176ºF) for three hours.

salt dough ghost shape

salt dough ornaments on a tray ready for the oven

Our ornaments puffed up quite a lot in the oven just like cookies.

Once you’ve baked them you can decorate them with acrylic paints. I did the painting with the girls a week after baking.

salt dough painting process

salt dough painting process 2

halloween salt dough ornament craft

Once the paint has dried, thread and hang your ornaments. We hung ours on a bare branch decorated with fake spider webs.

Halloween salt dough ornaments hanging in tree

Halloween salt dough ornaments hanging in tree

Halloween salt dough ghost hanging in tree

When it’s a bit closer to Halloween we might use our cookie cutters to bake some real cookies – yum!

Do your kids love making things with salt dough too?

You might also like:

• Check out these 8 Fun Halloween papercrafts for kids
• How to make a Witch’s potion
• Tie-dyed Halloween window decals
• Make a bubbling brew for pretend play
• Make some cute egg carton monster treat holders

Halloween salt dough ornaments kids can make

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  • Kate GronoKate GronoCrazy Craft Fanatic

    I’m basically a big kid who never grew up and still loves to muck around with paint, glitter, glue and toilet rolls. With the crafts shared here on this website I’m hoping to give other parents and carers inspiration to get crafty with their kids at home – make our projects, or use them as a source of inspiration to spark ideas of your own. When it comes to crafting no rules apply!

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