We've been making lots of different Easter decorations, but these have to be my absolute favourites so far! I love salt dough and have seen some great ideas for painting salt dough Easter eggs, but as my kids are too young to really paint details we went for a different approach and used our hands to imprint the dough and then paint in a solid colour.
First we made the salt dough using a very basic recipe of 2 parts flour, 2 parts salt and 1 part water. Ethan poured all of the ingredients into the bowl and stirred it around. We worked together to knead the dough into a ball, then we rolled it out nice and flat. We have some great little Easter cookie cutters that we used to cut out most of the shapes (except for the large eggs which I just shaped by hand.)
Once we had cut out all of our shapes it was time to make our prints and decorate them! We did the smaller eggs in a sort of polka dot design using Ethan and Ivy's fingerprints (I helped Ivy to do hers). Ethan really enjoyed doing this himself and having the ability and freedom to do it as he wished (I just had to watch that he didn't press too hard and go right through the egg!)
We also used their fingers to make faces for the bunnies, and tried using tools to make 'feathers' for the chick. I then made a large egg shape with all the leftover dough for each of the children and helped them to make a hand print into it, these are my favourite eggs of all! When we finished, I used a straw to make a hole at the top of each decoration to put a string through to hang them up.
I then baked them in the oven at 200 degrees for 2 hours, and left them overnight just to be sure that they were fully dried. The next day they were dry and ready to be painted! We mixed up some nice pastel colours (just by adding white paint to our bright colours, which Ethan really enjoyed watching happen) and they were ready to paint.
Ethan did a really good job of painting, he happily chose a different colour to paint each decoration and tried very hard to cover the whole thing with an even layer of paint. Even Ivy got in on the fun and painted a few of the decorations. I won't lie to you though...she did taste the paint, I just can't stop that girl from eating everything!
When the paint was dry I used a sharpie to write the childrens names and the date on the back of their handprint eggs and fingerprint eggs, those are definitely keepsakes!
In the end the Easter decorations look fantastic and we had so much fun making them. It was great to do a project with Ethan that took a few days, yet still kept his interest, and that he was just so excited to finish. Of course it was also great to involve Ivy as much as we could as she's getting a bit more capable, if she would just stop trying to eat all of our craft supplies it would be a lot easier!
Now our whole house is decorated for Easter the excitement is mounting, I just have to teach Ethan to read a calendar so that he doesn't keep asking me everyday if the Easter Bunny is coming today!
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1 comments
These are adorable! Thanks for allowing me to share in my Easter roundup!
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