Extra Special Salt Dough Ornaments.

Twenty months without Maelee today. Twenty. In honor of her...

On Sunday I invited fellow "baby loss" moms to come to our house and make ornaments honoring our babies in heaven. Christmas is a rough time for us mommas that don't have our child(ren) here for holidays and milestones. Last year was hard. And sad. And empty.

Ornaments have a special place in my heart because growing up, we got an ornament every year. It was tradition. And last year I broke down so upset that I couldn't buy Maelee's "Baby's First Christmas" ornament. And yes, Eli has had his for over a month already, I was so ready to get to buy one this year. It's hung right next to two other very precious ornaments.

I had a plethora of options and ideas for the baby loss ornament making this year (thanks Pinterest). But I decided to try my hand at making salt dough ornaments because I wanted to have the babies' names be stamped/engraved into the ornament. Here's my tutorial. You can make these whatever shape and write whatever you want on them... but they did work well for what I had intended: to honor our sweet children in heaven.

Apologies for the lame photos and the sweatshirt from 1994. Just ignore that.

Recipe:

1/2 cup salt
1 cup flour
1/2 cup water

Mix the salt and flour together really well and slowly add the water...

The dough should start to ball together:

Make your dough into a nice ball. Also, do not lick your hands. Do not rub your eyes. Bad things will happen. 

Roll it out (like pie crust). I used a wax paper sheet to prevent it from sticking to my rolling pin. But the next batch I didn't do this and was fine... depends on how you roll (literally). You want to make sure you get an even amount of dough or some (or part) of your ornaments will be too thick/too thin. Uneven dough will bake uneven and not work out well. Shoot for 1/4 inch thick.

Then cut out your shapes using a cookie cutter (I used a dove):

I used a straw to poke a hole for hanging. It worked really well and gave a good size for the string to go through. Just don't forget to poke that hole or you'll have a trinket and not an ornament.

 
I then used regular stamps (not pictured) and stamped our babies' names on the doves. This can be a bit tricky... do a test on some leftover dough to get the hang of it! I also tried using the end of a small paintbrush and "dotted" the names... it worked okay so if you don't have alphabet stamps, you could try that route.

Then bake them in the oven at 250 degrees for around two hours (if you have thicker ornaments, this will take much longer). Or you can leave them out overnight. They should be cookie hard. 

 

But not too cookie-hard! You don't want to "burn" them like cookies. So check often. This can also happen if you have uneven dough, like one of my batches. You don't want any discoloration like this. This is bad:

 

After they cool, paint the ornaments however you'd like. I used white pearl and silver regular craft acrylic paints. The key, I learned, is to NOT paint inside the letters you stamped. Don't do it. It's better. Promise. Then spray the thing with this "finishing spray". Verdict is still out on whether or not this is needed. It made my ornament softer. Not sure if it's vital... but I didn't want the ornament to "rot" so I thought it was pretty important to do it based on what other people have done. This stuff smells. Do this outside.

Best part: If you don't paint the letters front or back, the light from your Christmas lights will shine through. And then your heart will be a little less heavy because you smile when you see it on your tree:

Love it.

I'll post the other ornament ideas I did later!

-Heather