Fun Valentine DIY Project

Last week I was looking for a fun, easy, and free way to entertain the girls for the day. I stumbled upon this blog post on making salt dough and thought they would make cute ornaments to use for a Valentine's tree. They looked easy enough and we had all of the supplies on hand.

photo via Cobblestone Farms

Ours didn't turn out as cute as the ones above, but the girls had fun playing with the dough and I got the crafty fix I had been needing. ;)

Recipe:

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup salt

mix well and add

1/2 cup warm water

Form dough and shape with your hands or use cookie cutters

Bake at 325 degrees for a couple of hours

We rolled out the dough and used cookie cutters to make our hearts. I then made small loops with some wire to insert in the tops of each heart.

We made the ornaments in the morning and they baked in the oven while the girls napped. That afternoon we painted them pink and red and added some pink glitter for a little sparkle.

A few of the smaller ones we used to make heart necklaces...

...but the rest we used to decorate our tree.

To make the tree, we found a large branch in the yard that had lots of smaller stems to hang the ornaments on. We covered one of Caroline's formula cans with red scrap booking paper and used some floral foam to anchor the branch in the can, covering the foam with some small pebbles.

The recipe actually made about twice this many hearts, but our golden retriever must have thought they were cookies instead of ornaments. I wasn't thinking and left the sheet of ornaments outside to cool and he gobbled up about four before I realized it!

Oops! :)