By: McKenna Click

Anyone who knows me knows that I am creative, so it is no surprise that in my free
time I get on Pinterest and look at D.I.Y. projects. Recently, when I was looking through many
of the ideas, I started to wonder how hard they really are. So I decided to try out a
salt dough pendant. This seemed like it was really easy and something that I could not screw up, but I was wrong.
The caption of the picture says, “2 cups flour, 1 cup salt, cold water. Mix until has
consistency of play dough. Bake at 250 for 2 hours, then cool and paint.” The directions were
not very clear to start out with but I tried to follow them anyway.
I got the two cups of flour and one cup of salt. It was pretty straight forward, I could do
that, but cold water, how much cold water? I didn’t really know how much so I just added a
random amount of water and mixed.
If you plan on following this recipe, I suggest adding the water slowly and mixing the
batter very well before adding more water. If too much water is added the batter will resemble
pancake batter and will need to be thrown out.
Once the batter has the consistency of play dough, flour the surface that where the dough
will be worked on. I suggest rolling out the dough with a rolling pin so that the dough has the
same consistency all the way through and will cook evenly in the oven.
Also, if planning on making shapes out of the dough I suggest first putting the dough
on parchment paper and then using a cookie cutter to make the shapes. If the shapes are cut
out when the dough is still on the counter, the dough is likely to stick to it instead of coming off
easily.
I cut out a heart and had planned on making a pendant but learned that just poking a
hole through the side of the heart with a toothpick would not be good enough. I realized that
a toothpick should be inserted in the dough but then wiggled around to make the hole bigger
because a normal toothpick hole will shrink up after it has been baked.
Once the dough has been baked at 250 degrees for two hours and then cooled down,
painting is the next step. I bought enamel acrylic paint at Benjamin Franklin’s, and I am sure
it is a great product, but read the directions before using it. The surface to be painted needs to
be wiped down with alcohol and washed with soap and water before painted, but by the time I
realized that, it was too late they were already painted so they turned out looking silver instead of
metallic.
So this Pinterest project was a failure. It could be the lack of sleep lately, the bad directions,
or simply the fact I tried to salvage something when I should have started over. Either way
this project was not one that I would recommend if you actually want the product that is in the
picture.