It’s just a little over a week until Christmas. December always seems to just fly past, and so this is the second last Making Magical Christmas Memories challenge post for the year. So many people have shared some lovely ideas, and I’m very thankful to everyone who has joined in!

We have had some fun this week making some salt dough Christmas decorations for our Christmas tree. I was amazed at how well the girls were able to join in with their brothers with rolling the dough and cutting shapes out with our Christmas cookie cutters. To be honest I thought they would spend most of the time trying to eat the dough!! There was a bit of squabbling over the rolling pin though, as our home made rollers we usually use for play dough have disappeared. Note to self, next time make sure that there are enough rolling pins for everyone!

Of course the best part of making salt dough decorations is painting and decorating them afterwards, we haven’t completely finished decorating ours, but Mr 4 and I had some fun one on one time painting his.

To Make Salt Dough Decorations:

• 3 cups of plain flour
• 2 cups of cooking salt
• Up to 2 cups of water
• 1 teaspoon of glycerine (this isn’t absolutely necessary)

Mix the flour and salt well, add the glycerine and gradually add the water, stirring as you go, stop adding the water when you have a dough that is not too sticky. Knead the dough well on a floured surface, this is great for little hands to do! Once you have a smooth and easily workable dough your little ones can get busy with rolling pins and cookie cutters. Use something like a skewer or a straw to pierce holes in the shapes so they can be hung as decorations. Bake the decorations in a slow oven (about 100 degrees celcius) until completely hard, this will take about three hours. Your will need turn them over about half- way through baking. Allow to cool and then you can decorate! We have been using acrylic paints and glitter to decorate ours this year.

 So many absolutely amazing Christmas ideas and activities were linked up last week that is hard to choose which ones to feature. If you didn’t look through them all last week then you definitely should! Here are just some of the fabulous ideas shared:

My Little Bookcase went on a magical sleigh ride

These gorgeous Snowman Puppets were shared on Hands on As We Grow

Let Kids Create shared their lovely family tradition of a Toy Block Keepsake Tree

 

Now on to the fun that has been happening this week! If you’re a reader please share in the comments below or on the Facebook page, and if you blog join up in the linky below, it will be open all week.