25 Days of Ornaments: Salt-dough ornaments

Last year, I made some Fimo ornaments, but this year, it really wasn't an option (I've only seen that type of clay once in Istanbul) -- and really, who needs it when they are multiple clay-like tutorials on Pinterest?

The first tutorial I tried was this cornstarch/baking soda/water concoction. It didn't work for me. The first time around, I admittedly skimped on the baking soda because baking soda is in short supply here. For whatever reason, you can only buy baking soda in Turkey in these little 5-gram packets...and my cut-down version, a fourth of the original, still required 59 grams of baking soda. That's a lot of little packets. On the first try, my ornaments cracked terribly -- but I suppose it was my own fault. On the second try, I sucked it up and used the required amount of little baking-soda packets. My ornaments still cracked, though not as badly as the first time. So I gave up on that recipe -- from the comments on the original website, it seems like the recipe is hit or miss. For some people, it worked great, for others, not so much.

So, I decided to try salt-dough ornaments next -- I hadn't made them since grade school. All of my childhood salt-dough ornaments crumbled and died long ago, but one of my brother's still exists -- it's Snoopy sitting on his doghouse, but you can't really tell anymore, I just happen to remember that what it was. Because of this, I wasn't that keen on doing salt-dough ornaments -- I do like my ornaments to last -- but I decided to play around with them this year just for fun.

So I had fun. I used this recipe, but brushed up on the basics with this salt-dough tutorial. And it was fun. :)  But once they were baked, after an endless amount of baking time, I didn't know what to do with them. I tried decorating some of them with beads, which I didn't like, but I was quite pleased with the ones I adorned with paper tape.

Yep, paper tape. Instead of washi tape, I used the paper tape I bought much more cheaply at Target. I got the idea of using washi tape from a Pinterest pin -- I saw the photo and thought maybe she had used clay ornaments, but when I actually checked the link, it turned out that she was using cardboard IKEA ornaments. But it turns out you can actually affix paper tape to salt-dough ornaments.

When I tried to tape down the sides, the tape wouldn't attach, so I cut the tape to align with the top edges. The tape seemed to stick pretty well once the edges were perfectly aligned, but I used a little bit of all-purpose glue just to be safe. It's been a couple of days now and the ornaments are still in good shape, but I can't attest yet to their longetivity. So keep that in mind. :)