Necessity is the mother of invention. Well I just had a reason to make this statement. Recently I was feeling like making something out of polymer clay ,but unfortunately i did not have any at home. There are no craft stores near by where I live. When I was in Davis we had couple of stores in the downtown where I could shop my craft items . So when I started thinking I suddenly realized that I can make some things out of salt dough. Since salt and flour are always at home I didn't have to worry about the ingredients.
Long ago I had purchased a country dough craft book by Linda Rogers in Davis from a used book store called 'Logos' . This book has nice country crafts which will surely look beautiful in anybody's home. Even though I bought this book long ago , I did not somehow try anything from this book. Finally the day came to Try one of these from the book.
Dough craft is easy and very inexpensive to make. All it requires is salt , flour and water which are at home all the time. Additional things which are required are colors to paint . One good thing about this is any kind of paint can be used from water color ,acrylic to spray paint etc. any kind of wood varnish to glaze after it is baked.
Like polymer clay even this is baked in your house oven at a very low temperature ( 200 degree F ) . But the difference is polymer clay will be ready in 15 mins where has baking the salt dough is a long process. I can say to bake this cooking range it has taken me around 10 hours at least. Then it must cool down completely before we paint. At least two coats of paints are required and there should be at least 6 hours gap before we apply the second coat. Varnish is also applied in two or three coats. I have used water color which I had purchased 5 years back from paint chip . Luckily colors had not dried up :) .
This is the cooking range in the book which is perfect.
This is what I have made, shapes are irregular , the flooring is just okay and the basket on the floor is not looking exactly like a basket I suppose. I did not even make the boots since I could not shape it so well.
I just created a background to take a picture and I used these three cute porcelain dolls that I had purchased from a thrift store in Davis.
The basket of tomatoes and the jam, honey and the salt containers are my own creation which is not there in the book. After I made the cooking range some dough was left and I had stored in the fridge. Salt dough when kept for a long time will become very soft and it will be hard to shape but I did not want to waste the dough so tried these it was hard to shape these but I made some thing anyway .
Containers have irregular shape and the handles for the basket is not perfect either.
Over all it was a good experience , very time consuming but I can pop the things in the oven and I can forget about them for long long hours. As long as the temperature is in minimum the dough will not burn. I hope the next dough craft I try will turn out better than this :)
Have fun !
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