Salt Dough 101

     One Christmas when I was in grade school, my brother and I each got a fresh stick of modeling clay.  Mine was green and my brother’s was red.  He immediately modeled a piece of excrement with his.  It looked so real that he grossed himself out and flushed it down the toilet.  Bye bye Christmas clay! 

    I kept my green clay for several years and spent many happy hours making pies and pancakes for my dolls.  They thought green pancakes were fun for Saint Patrick’s Day, but they got tired of seeing them every day of the year.  So eventually I bought a pack of Play Doh with my allowance.  With four colors to choose from, I was able to make a wider variety of appetizing foods.  I am, however, the kind of anal retentive Virgo who still has the original shoes that came with Barbie fashions I received for Christmas when I was six (that’s over forty years ago).  Was I going to mix the basic red, blue, yellow, and white dough to make other colors?  No way!  Kids I knew who mixed up their Play Doh ended up with yucky gray-brown lumps.  I don’t even like for different kinds of real food to touch on my plate.  

    My mother cooked up some home made salt dough once but it came out very soft and sticky and she only made one color – a murky red.  I had no idea salt dough could be such a versatile medium until about three years ago when I happened to check a book on salt dough crafting out of the library.  It only costs about $1 to make a three-cup batch of salt dough.  You can make enough salt dough meals to feed a whole platoon of hungry Joes from that one batch of dough so compared to the price of commercially produced plastic rements, play scale salt dough food is an incredible bargain.  It’s also tremendous fun!

    So I hope you will enjoy the first in a new series of tutorials on play scale crafting with salt dough and please excuse my silence last week (classes started this week and I was preparing my syllabi):

À Bientôt